How to Quit Smoking Tobacco

 I started smoking when I wasn’t quite fourteen and puffed cigarettes for twenty years. I finally quit just months after finding out I was HIV positive because studies showed smoking was linked with faster progression of HIV disease to Aids.

I grew up in southern Virginia tobacco country. The small, enterprising town of South Hill was the third largest tobacco market in the state with five huge competing warehouses. Farmers from surrounding counties who were luckily enough to have government allocated rights to raise a few acres of the valuable crop brought their flue-cured tobacco to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Their bundled and graded golden brown leaf was then shipped off to Richmond for manufacturing into cigarettes in the factories lining the bluffs above the James River. Queen Elizabeth’s friend Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the Virginia Indian habit of smoking tobacco in long clay pipes to London about 1600. Much to the annoyance of the social critics of the day, Londoners were soon hooked. From the start smoking was derided as a vile, dirty, smelly and unhealthful habit. But being the highly addictive drug it is, smoking chewing and sniffing tobacco quickly caught on not only in London but around the world. The first English colony in America grew rich exporting the leaf to Europe and its tobacco based economy spread across the northern tier of the Old South. One could say America was founded on tobacco, its first cash crop. The economic interests of the tobacco industry held great sway politically in Washington D.C. into the 1970s, supported by long-serving southern Democratic congressmen and senators.

As a boy I spent my earliest years exploring and playing on the sixty acre farm behind my house. Five foot tall tobacco plants with their broad leaves provided a perfect jungle setting for imaginary war games with my green plastic military toy tanks and soldiers. My first pretend job was on Mr. Gee’s farm “handing” tobacco to be tied to a stick. In the 1950s, mules still pulled sleds through the long rows of tobacco plants as the pickers labored to fill them before the bulging sleds headed off to the tying shed. The workers on the farm were all Black - except the foreman who was mostly out in the field picking leaves with the other sweating, muscle-toned men. It was backbreaking work. The men stooped low to pluck the leaves at the bottom of the plant that were beginning to turn brown, stashing them under their arm until their arms were full, then placing them in the sled. At the tying shed Old Momma was the undisputed boss. She and the younger mothers who tied the freshly picked leaves to the stick, all brought their children to work. The older kids helped hand three leaf bundles of tobacco to the young women who tied it with string, alternating to either side of the stick. The youngest kids just played or rested lazily at their mother’s feet in the warm shade of the shed attached to the curing barn. At the end of the day the four foot long sticks of tied tobacco were hoisted high into the rafters of the curing barn. Then it was a special treat for me to ride the mules bareback down to the stream for watering. At the end of August 1958 I was ready to start first grade in elementary school. I asked my mother, “Why can’t my friends from the farm go to the same school I do.” Jean explained simply, “You go to your school, and they go to their school.” That was just the way things were. A fact of life. School segregation didn’t end in Southern Virginia until 1968, the year I left for St. Christopher’s preparatory school in Richmond.

In Southside Virginia in the 1960s almost all the teens smoked cigarettes, even the athletes. It was the cool thing to do. The Surgeon General’s report linking tobacco smoke to cancer had not come out yet so health was not a consideration. Playing in a rock and roll band in high school just cemented my own smoking habit.

All five guys in our Beatles-era teen rock band smoked fags and drank beer – and just as often bourbon with Coke. “The Riding Hoods” played teenage and young adult dance parties at Pine Lake, the Rec Center, the American Legion hall and the local country clubs. Covering the hit songs of the day, our play list was packed with the early Rolling Stones and Black “soul music” – “Can’t Get No, Satisfaction”, “House of the Rising Sun”, “Mustang Sally”, “Soul Man”, “Gloria” and “In the Midnight Hour”. We played fifty minute sets with fifteen minute smoke breaks and got paid cash at the end of each gig. We were cool - sort of, smoking our fags….just like Mick Jagger and the rest of the British rock stars.

After three years The Riding Hoods had run their course, so following a year away in Richmond at prep school mother moved my two brothers and me to Honolulu, Hawaii. “Paradise” Jean liked to call it. Living in a high rise apartment in Waikiki with a dead-on view of Diamond Head Mountain and a panoramic view over the Ali Wai Canal and golf course toward the cloud capped Ko’olau Mountain Range, I again attended a public high school. Ninety-nine percent of the three thousand students at Kaimuki High were East Asian in origin or from the Pacific islands. The vast majority were Japanese - sansei and yonsei mostly - third and fourth generation Americans.

Despite my love of Hawaii’s plumeria blossom scented tropical evening breezes, I grew up with tobacco in my blood and tobacco wax on my hands. Of course they smoked as much in Hawaii as they did in Virginia – only menthols – a whole separate addiction. That was supposedly because the islands once had run out of regular cigarettes during a shipping strike and everyone got hooked on the only cigs still available….Salem.

Today, everyone knows tobacco is an addictive drug. Some say more addictive than heroin. It’s really hard to quit once you’ve picked up the habit, and it doesn’t take long to get hooked. And it’s a very expensive habit. Today cigarettes cost thirteen dollars a pack in New York – unbelievable! When I started smoking cigarettes they only cost twenty-five cents. I quit smoking twenty-five years ago and since then I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars. However much more important than money, I’ve saved my health.

Tobacco smoking is absolutely the worst thing people can do to damage their health. Every time you smoke you are taking dozens of chemicals into the lungs. One report claimed cigarettes contained as many as fifty different chemicals. Others say more, even hundreds. But the worst are tar and nicotine.

The bottom line is that cigarettes are expensive, highly addictive, terrible for your health, and a little nasty too. No wonder the do-gooders of the world, starting off in Berkeley and West Hollywood California, finally got them banned in so many places. If you are HIV positive, you need to ban them from your mouth, lungs and life too.

Ask anyone who has ever smoked - quitting is not easy. Like ending any drug addiction quitting smoking is one of the hardest things in life to do. At least you think it is until you actually do it. According to long-term surveys only about five percent of people who try to stop remain successful after one year. Those who use aids like nicotine gum, patches or e-cigarettes have success rates in the rage of 7-10% after one year. Of course quitting is hard. But many goals in life aren’t as hard as you think they will be before you actually achieve them. In my case it only took one day of will power to quit smoking. So how hard can it be?

I quit smoking in 1986, five months after testing HIV positive. Although I had never been a heavy smoker, I had come to HATE it. Over the years I averaged about half a pack, a day and never smoked more than a pack. I had established a habit of smoking only when also drinking either a caffeinated drink like Coke or coffee, or an alcoholic beverage. I would never smoke unless I was also drinking something. This helped limit my smoking. Of course I knew it was bad for me, but the thing I grew to hate most was that cigarettes were controlling me rather than me controlling them. I had thought about quitting for years, but as soon as I found out it was bad for someone with HIV and might accelerate disease progression I made up my mind. I had to quit.

As with most things, easier said than done.

Yes, I wanted to quit. But how? When? I was determined - but it’s not that simple. You have to build up your determination bit-by-bit in order to achieve a goal like that. People who have never smoked don’t realize how hooked you are and how hard it is to quit. It takes a concerted effort of mind over matter because your body has to overcome a physical addiction, at the same time your mind overcomes an emotional addiction to the habit of having that cigarette between your fingers. If you learn to hate smoking you are ready to get over the emotional part. Realizing that disgusting feeling that cigarettes are controlling you helps give you the will to overcome the physical part as well. So if you want to stop smoking, learn to hate it in yourself, not in others. Let them smoke and damage their health if they want to. But you need to learn to hate the fact that the tobacco is controlling you. And you should not let any drug, legal or not, control you, damage your health and shorten your life.

A few months after testing positive in 1985 a good opportunity to quit presented itself when I left home for Christmas holiday. Working as a real estate agent in Los Angeles, I decided to spend Christmas and New Years in my old stomping grounds of Waikiki, Honolulu and Oahu, a five hour flight from LA. Smoking wasn’t allowed aboard the plane so I figured if I could go five hours without smoking a single cigarette I could go more. I had decided on my plan.

Before I left my spacious apartment in Carthy Circle near the Miracle Mile, I symbolically threw the few remaining cancer sticks in my pack into the toilet and flushed. That was almost three hours before departure time from LAX. By the time the American Airlines jumbo jet started descending over Pearl Harbor and throttled down to land at Honolulu International I’d already been nicotine free for eight hours – almost over the hump.

The warm humid tropical air enveloped me as soon as I stepped off the 747. After grabbing my bags and taking the airport shuttle service to the Gateway Hotel in Waikiki, I needed an hour’s rest before getting ready to go out on the town for the evening. By the time I finished dinner overlooking the tiki torch lite Pacific lazily lapping at the beach, it had been more than twelve hours since I had had a smoke. Surprisingly I no longer had that nagging urge to light one up after a meal. The next morning the cravings were gone. I felt the slight need for a cigarette a couple of times over the next two days but since I didn’t have any on me there was no easy way to give into a momentary, passing impulse to smoke. I refused to bum one as I normally would if I ran out. My plan was working. I was having a great time on the beach, enjoying the sun and luminescent waters of Hawaii and driving into the towering, jungle-cloaked Ko’olau mountain range where as a senior in high school I used to go to the forbidden royal waterfalls to swim.

The sign read, “KAPU! - Watershed - Keep Out!” Waterfalls on the island were once restricted for Hawaiian royalty alone to enjoy. Now even a haole – white – commoner like me could enjoy the incredible serenity of an idyllic island waterfall pouring abundantly down into a magical, crystal clear, cold mountain pool, arched over by a lush green jungle canopy. Occasionally a tropical bird would call from out of sight, or suddenly flit colorfully across the opening to a tree on the far side. Few knew of Kapu* falls. This secluded, unspoiled tropical jungle paradise was preserved for only one or two close friends to share at a time. The privileged few who knew the slippery and steep, root clinging climb down to the falls carefully guarded its secret.

There were no cigarettes at Kapu falls. Centuries before Sir Walther Raleigh first exported his addictive herb to the coffee and ale shops of London, that primordial island setting would have appeared exactly the same.

So a vacation in the magical paradise of Hawaii helped cure My addiction. After twenty years I finally conquered King Tobacco, driving a stake through the heart of my addiction. That was certainly preferable to it killing me!

So what did I learn about quitting smoking?

First, if you can get through the first 24 hours you are seventy percent of your way to your goal of stopping. Second, if you can get through 72 hours – three days – you are ninety percent of the way to successfully quitting – at least ninety percent over the physical addiction. It’s also helpful to symbolically throw your cigarettes away or flush them down the toilet. The key to success is will power. You need to learn to hate smoking – to hate the habit, the addiction – to hate that it controls you instead of you controlling it. If you train yourself to hate your own worst habit, it will be much easier to quit. And once you quit, never ever smoke again. No, not even one little smoke. Never. This is far easier if no one else smokes in your household.

Some say that for every minute you smoke tobacco you take ten minutes off your life. If that is true, is it really worth smoking?

Recently I helped my office assistant in Johannesburg stop smoking. Kobus* was a chain smoker snubbing out three packs of butts a day - one after another. He was only twenty-eight but his heavy smoking was already affecting his health. Coughing too much, Kobus started to have breathing problems. Plus, he needed to see the doctor for various health issues much more often than a twenty-eight year old HIV negative man in his prime should have.

I repeatedly encouraged him to quit. He wanted to stop but he was terribly addicted. I bought him a book about how to quit smoking and he read part of it. Finally he paid to attend a full-day stop smoking seminar. Like me, he quit cold turkey - all at once by using only his will power and no artificial additives or devices. Kobus says he’ll never smoke again. I believe him. He saved his own life.

So why is smoking so bad for your health?

First, smoking irritates the lungs. That’s why you cough. Your immune system reacts to the excess of smoke in your lungs the same way it would if another invader, a virus or bacteria had entered your lungs. It tries to cough it out. Smoke irritates the lungs causing inflammation – “turning on” your immune system. And when you turn on your immune system in response to any foreign invader – smoke or germs – this tends to increase HIV replication. In long-term or heavy smokers, the inflammation becomes chronic, often resulting in a chronic cough. Inflammation caused by the smoke particles in the lungs leads to an increase in free radicals that damage the structure of lung cells and eventually damages their DNA. Damaged deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) causes cellular mutations when your cells divide, as they regularly do.

To form the first cancerous cell it normally requires the accumulation of three different mutations to a cell’s DNA. That process usually takes a number of years before the first cell loses control over how often it divides. Once a single cell loses control over its ability to stop dividing, it continues to divide without stopping. It is a cancer cell and every cancer starts with only one cell turning cancerous. The main difference between a normal cell and a cancer cell is that most normal cells divide only about once a year. But once a cell becomes cancerous, it can’t turn off the division process. It cannot stop dividing. It keeps multiplying, becoming a bigger and bigger clump of cells, eventually forming a tumor. When the tumor grows big enough, little clumps of cancer cells can split off from that original tumor, merge into the blood stream and move to another organ or part of the body. It metastasizes. That is how a lung cancer can spread to the pancreas or cells from a stomach cancer can move to the liver and become a liver cancer.

According to scientists, smoking and using other tobacco products cause approximately half of all human cancers, not just lung cancers. Why is that? How can smoking cause other kinds of cancer? The answer lies in the circulation of blood.

One of the primary jobs of the blood circulatory system – besides taking nutrition from the stomach and intestines to feed cells throughout the body and remove cellular waste – is to take oxygen from the lungs to all the cells. Like tiny dump trucks, red blood cells are specially designed to pick up oxygen from the lungs and deliver it to cells. Then the red corpuscles return to the lungs for more oxygen.

The first cancer cell continues to divide until it is a small clump of cancer cells. As the tumor grows larger a few of those cancer cells eventually break off from the main clump, work their way through the membrane and into the blood vessel and ride the blood stream off to another part of the body. Those few cancer cells have a one way ticket out of the lungs to almost anywhere in the body. Soon they come to rest lodging somewhere else in the body, down-stream from the lungs - maybe in the pancreas or the liver. If they settle in the pancreas, they reestablish themselves as a colony of pancreatic cancer cells. Or they can end up in almost any other organ or tissue and establish a secondary cancer there. That is why smoking causes about 50% of all cancers, not just lung cancers. Of course smoking and chewing tobacco also causes oral cancers, including cancers of the mouth, gums, tongue, throat, larynx and naso-pharynx region.

Smoking also contributes significantly to cardio-vascular disease – diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Smoking irritates the lungs causing activation of the immune system and inflammation. This inflammation negatively affects the circulatory system.

Macrophages – “big eater” cells – are specialized gigantic white blood cells that surround and consume foreign particles that enter the body, including smoke particles. Macrophages congregate in the lungs since this is a traditional invasion route for viruses and bacteria. When a person inhales smoke, macrophage cells gobble up the foreign particles. Eventually, continued irritation and inflammation damages the blood vessels in the same way. Smoking increases cellular stress and the production of free radicals. These damage the inner walls of the blood vessels which respond by building up protective plaques – similar to tooth plaque – in order to protect the blood vessels from further damage.

Blood vessels are narrow to start with. When they accumulate protective plaques this thickens the vessels walls, narrowing the channel for blood to flow through as well as making them less flexible, less elastic and this constitutes hardening of the arteries. The thickened, narrowed blood vessels cause high blood pressure – hypertension - and that contributes to both heart attack and stroke.

Sooner or later blood vessel plaques attract sticky blood cells that form a blood clot which reduces blood flow even further. When a blood clot breaks free from the inner wall of the blood vessel it can move toward the heart or brain causing a heart attack or stroke. This is why smokers run a much higher risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke – and death - than non-smokers. Luckily, five years after quitting smoking a former addict’s chances of having a heart attack or stroke falls to the level as if they had never smoked.

Smokers experience a much higher rate of lung infections than non-smokers. They are more likely to come down with colds, and are more likely to catch influenza or where it is prevalent, tuberculosis – TB. Emphysema and bronchitis are other serious conditions usually caused by the damage to the lungs and bronchial tubes inflicted by smoking.

Whether you are HIV positive or not, health experts agree smoking tobacco is the worst thing you can do for your health. The best thing anyone can do for their health is to STOP SMOKING.

On average, smoking cuts a person’s life expectancy by five to seven years. But that’s an average - for some people it reduces longevity much more. If you are HIV positive you don’t want to place any extra stress on your immune system or have any more years taken off your life. So my best advice is give up smoking – NOW!

Start by telling your friends and family that you want to quit smoking and ask them to support and encourage you to achieve this important life goal. If more than one person smokes in your house, ask that person to stop too, or at least change their habit to smoke outside, or in a different room. If you are pregnant, know that smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol during pregnancy can damage your baby’s health. That may affect the health of your child for the rest of their life. No matter who you are, you should STOP SMOKING NOW. Studies show that children of parents who smoke have a much higher rate of asthma than children of parents who don’t smoke. Some studies have even connected smoking to sudden infant death syndrome – SIDS - although the cause of SIDS is not clear and remains highly debatable.

There are several methods to try to stop smoking but most require some planning and summonsing your emotional will power. Read a book about how to stop smoking. It will give you numerous ideas, strategies and tactics to help you stop. Attend a stop smoking seminar. That may scare you into quitting or provide you with incentives and strategies to help you stop. If necessary, use the crutch of a nicotine patch or nicotine gum to replace the drug you have been getting from tobacco.

Now that I am living in South Africa, if I had it to quit again my plan would be to go on a camping trip with friends who don’t smoke and who promise to help me quit. We’d visit Kruger National Park to see the animals - none of whom smoke! I’d throw away my cigarettes when I left home and by the time I return two or three days later I’d be clean. 90% of the addiction would be gone and I’d have no more smelly ash trays to empty. Why don’t you try something similar – or something different – as long as you stop.

Stopping smoking is all about determination – mind over matter – using will power to conquer this nasty habit. No one else can do this for you, you have to do it for yourself. Before you stop it seems like the impossible challenge. But first you need to detest your addiction and overcome your fear that you aren’t strong enough to beat it. You are strong enough! You just have to use the right self-motivational strategies and tactics to achieve your goal of a cleaner, smoke-free, addiction-free life. It’s all about gathering your determination and overcoming your fear of failure.

In the end it comes down to who is stronger, you or your addiction to tobacco. That is your challenge. I’m betting on YOU.

If I could quit smoking, so can YOU.

After you have quit you will feel better, healthier, and you’ll have more energy – plus you’ll have more cash in your pocket each week.

So start developing your own personal strategy to quit smoking now. Do it for yourself. Do it for your family and children. You’ll be glad you did. Then you can enjoy a smoke free tomorrow and breathe a whole lot easier. I sure did.