Evans Liberal Politics, June 7, 2011, by Paul Evans, originally published as part of the larger page entitled Resources on Quitting Smoking and Free Dating, Evans Liberal Politics, August 19, 2010, by Paul Evans.

If you’ve seen this article before I invite you to look at it anew with the addition at the bottom below the music. It’s completely rewritten and is really an article about my personal odyssey in quitting smoking, what works and what doesn’t, and resources around the internet for people who want to stop smoking.

I’ve never done anything so hard for me in my life as quitting smoking. It’s really hard for me just to go a few hours without cigarettes, and to go days without smokes, either because I am trying to quit, or because I have no money to buy cigarettes, has been sheer hell. I tried just smoking cigars, because I thought that would ease things, and then I wouldn’t be as addicted. So I thought. No, actually that just makes the addiction worse, since cigars really have more nicotine in them than cigarettes. When I try to quit, my stomach and torso feels like it’s trying to pull itself inside out, but somehow, I may even be a little “together” today. I admit it. The important point is, you have to be ready to quit — you have to be in the right place in your life.

This last year, I have usually purchased the cheap little cigars which, in so far as I can see, are only different from cigarettes in that those cheap little cigars have a brown wrapper. But they are also stronger and smell worse. I always bought a brand called “Smoker’s Choice.” While a pack of Marlboro’s costs $5.15 a pack or more in Ohio, Smoker’s Choice costs only $1.69 a pack or two packs for $3.04 at my local Speedway gas station. Yes, I have also tried rolling my own with those machines, which does reduce your cost by about half versus prepackaged cigarettes. Maybe if I were retired I would actually have time for that: working a part time job and running this website and then trying to live my life actually does take up so much of my time that I am short of sleep as it is.

Last time I checked, there were 1.3 billion smokers in the world, a figure which is increasing because of an increase in smoking in undeveloped nations. Yet statistics show that 1 billion people have successfully quit. I found that fact quite comforting. It means that quitting is “doable,” and that one heck of a lot of people do eventually have success and are able to quit. This is very encouraging because, if that many people can do it, you know that you should be able to also.

UPDATE, June 6, 2011 and March 20, 2011: I cannot afford being addicted to cigarettes in several ways, mainly because it has been killing me rather quickly by means of COPD and an inherited tendency to heart failure, for which I have to take Lasix to keep fluid off of my system. Although in the last few years my breathing has actually improved, I know that before too long I must find a way to quit, or else slowly die a rather horrible death, as did my mother.

I don’t think that I am really in a place in my life where I can expect to be able to quit smoking right now. But I do have a lot of experience in going weeks at a time without a smoke, I have tried most of the methods, and I know what works and what doesn’t. Moreover I have done a lot of research on this topic, talked with several authorities on the subject, and I truly believe that this article may well be of service to you if you really want to quit and if you are in a place in your life to have success at quitting.

My Dad is a wonderful Dad who is 86 years old and in a nursing home. I would really like him to die knowing I’ll be around for a while. My mother died of emphysema and COPD from smoking, and I lost a fiancee because I could not quit smoking for her as she needed. So finding out how to quit smoking is really personal with me. I hope that this article can help those of my readers who need to or want to quit smoking. ~ Paul

Like Mom, I also have a case of COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, almost entirely the result of smoking, and it’s only going to get worse if I am not successful in quitting. Engraved in my mind is an image of a man I saw quite a few years ago, sitting outside of a hospital in a wheelchair. He had a trach tube in his throat and was holding a cigarette up to that and smoking from it. I really don’t want to find myself in a similar situation twenty years from now. I also know that my COPD does in fact improve when I go as little as one week without smoking, which I had to do a few times when hospitalized.

I have gathered a LOT of useful information below about quitting smoking for you. I have wanted to quit a lot for several years now, and have looked all over the web to find what help I could find. I really hope that some of you may find it useful. I know these are these are some of the best links on the internet on quitting smoking, so please try them out. I wish everyone luck in their journey to not being a nicotine junkie. I know I am going to succeed — sooner or later — because I have God on my side in this, because I have all of your prayers, and because I am no longer afraid of the withdrawal, as I have been. If you are afraid of it you may as well not try. (For me, there has been a real fear of being without cigarettes around me. Until I conquered that fear, I really didn’t stand a chance.) If anybody wants to lend a few words of encouragement, please feel encouraged to email me.

Facts About Smoking and Your Health and Quitting Successfully:

The fact is, 90 percent of the people who have successfully quit smoking cigarettes, (and there are one billion people in the world who have successfully quit), quit successfully by just stopping cold turkey. (Listen to that advice only if you want to be successful in quitting; ignore it otherwise.) There is one website I would highly recommend to help with quitting cold turkey, and that is WhyQuit.com. It will help you with motivation and facts and techniques. Another good website is SilkQuit. There you will find, among other aids, the Silk Meter. It is a little program that starts up with Windows and monitors a.) how many cigarettes you have “not smoked” (since you quit), b.) how much money you have saved (it really adds up!) and c.) statistically, on average, how many months (or years) and days and hours you have added to your life by having quit for however long. This is a really neat motivational tool. They ask you to donate $4.95 but you can download it for free if you are poor (like me).

Cigarettes and Nicotine Addiction

Another thing is, cigarettes have 454 carcinogenic additives in them, and most of those are addictive. The exceptions are Winston and Natural American Spirit cigarettes, which claim to be pure tobacco without additives. Don’t be fooled. Additives or no additives, NICOTINE KILLS. Cigarettes are designed to be the most pleasurable and addictive possible nicotine delivery vehicle that science can devise. This horrible addictiveness is what we’re up against. Smoking causes 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of all deaths from lung cancer. It also kills slowly, sucking the vibrancy and vitality from your body and leaving you out of breath, and full of a drug (nicotine) which causes an addiction described by WikiAnswers as “more addictive than heroin”. I have friends who used to be addicted to heroin, and they say that smoking cigarettes has a really bad psychological addiction but that the physical addiction is nowhere near as strong for cigarettes as it is with heroin.

But for those of us who have suffered from mental illness, such as myself, particularly schizophrenia, “data from the National Comorbidity Survey revealed that whereas the population prevalence of current smoking among those with no mental illness was 22.5%, some 41% of those reporting a mental illness were current smokers.” (Medscape) The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that “nearly 45 percent of all smokers in the United States are people with a ‘mental disorder.’” And Medscape adds that “those with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder consume an estimated 34% to 44% of all cigarettes smoked in the United States.”

Do you think that maybe cigarettes and nicotine might really not be that bad and that you might actually smoke them and your health might not be affected? Consider the history of tobacco cultivation and nicotine use in the world: in fact, the first use of nicotine on a large scale in this country was as an agricultural insecticide. They sprayed it on the fields of crops to kill insects! (I do realize that smoking tobacco came first – but the first commercial use of nicotine per se was as an insecticide.)

Make Up Your Mind.
Quit Smoking Cold Turkey Soon.
Then Talk About It with Friends!

It’s one hell of an addiction, particularly for the mentally ill, who usually can afford to buy cigarettes far less than the average person, too. I’ve spent the last change in my house on “Smoker’s Choice” or “Red Buck” little cigars (20 per pack) that sell under $2 at gas stations. Several times. These really make my COPD worse and also increase the nicotine addiction. While they may have less tobacco (one wonders just how much cardboard they stick in cigaratoids like these), I think they are chocked full of nicotine. And make no mistake about it, cigarettes are really bad for your health. To be exact, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the world today. But if you’re like me, you just can’t quit until the time is right, and then, it hasn’t happened for me, but I expect that when the time is right, it just falls away. I’m praying that I am ready, and that I won’t fail again. I know there are one heck of a lot more reasons to quit than to go on smoking. Not easily though. Not at all easily. The withdrawal is exquisite and lasts in the primary sense about three days of sheer hell (which I have gone through repeatedly in my life) and then about two weeks of discomfort. For me, it felt like my stomach was sucking itself inside out, and I trembled with nervousness and considered checking into a mental hospital a few of the times I quit. The worst statistic is that 50% of all regular smokers die as a result of smoking. And did you ever wonder why, when you smoke cigarettes, you don’t sleep so well and wake up after just a few hours? It’s true, read the MedScape article which proves that Cigarette Smoking Causes Sleep Disturbances. I think that accounts for my own history of insomnia, at least in part.

Please Share this Article with Your Friends
Who Are Trying to Quit Smoking

Remember back when you were a kid? How the hours went past pleasantly and you weren’t just dividing up the times between the times when you were able to smoke a cigarette. The awful truth is that, when you smoke cigarettes, the only time when you are really content is when you are smoking a cigarette. That plus whatever. Wouldn’t you like to be really free of that? Free to spend your time whatever way you want to? Not simply thinking about the next time you get to smoke? And it’s even worse if you’re poor. I was at a local food bank (I’m not too proud to confess), and there was this nice English lady there who said her father always used to say, when he met a smoker: “Oh, you smoke. You’ll never be rich then….”

Cigars are NO SAFER than cigarettes, and you get a LOT of nicotine, but somehow as a lifelong cigarette smoker I find they just don’t satisfy me like a good full flavor cigarette will, and they lessen the suffering of withdrawal. In the final analysis, although I have known at least one person who rarely smoked a cigar or two during withdrawal and even afterwards, I would not recommend this technique and will not use it in quitting myself. I talked about it with the people at 1-800-QUIT-NOW (a free counseling service for those trying to quit), and they said this was no way to quit. You may not want to try it, but the best way is just to prepare yourself for suffering for three days, and to a lesser extent for two weeks, and to go cold turkey.

When you do try to quit and have stopped smoking, all my sources say to drink lots of water and also fruit juice. This will help get the poisons out of your system. Also, try to take the things in your life that you strongly associate with smoking away. If you always smoke while drinking coffee, try to do without that for a few days. Be aware that there are certain “cues” you have deeply ingrained which have always caused you to reach for a cigarette. When you go a couple of days enduring those cues and not smoking when you are getting those signals to smoke, that is the hardest part of the psychological addiction which you will face. In my experience, that is the hardest part of quitting, or at least it has been for me.

Won’t you all please say a prayer for me in my own journey of quitting all smoking altogether, and not just for me, but for all the 5.4 million people who die in the world each year from smoking cigarettes? We don’t need your condemnation, or your condescension, or your shunning and judgment of us as smokers. We don’t need all the ways you make it difficult for us in this life, not just where we can smoke, and when we can smoke, but also the fact that many people in the world won’t have anything to do at all with a smoker. You won’t date us, you won’t front us a fiver for a badly needed pack of cigs, and basically, you shun us as if we were evil.

We need your love, and your compassion, and your caring encouragement and help to quit, NOT all the shunning and making our lives hell. I say that totally as one who has “been through the wars”. Just say a prayer for us, and maybe do something nice for one of us that you know, won’t you? If you know somebody who is addicted and can’t quit and is broke, won’t you buy the poor guy a pack of cigarettes? Seriously, forget all the bullsh*t moralizing and the logic of it. Just do this nice thing for him or her, and he’ll really love you for it.

It’s not so easy for smokers in Ohio either, since one cannot legally smoke near a public building or business within 100 feet of the door. Have mercy on the poor smokers you know. I know from experience, I wanted to quit really badly for four years before I was at all successful. The song about that below is “Grace Tells Another Story” by Mercy Me. Pray to God, smokers, that somehow he might grant you the grace to stop smoking cigarettes. Remember that 90 percent of successful quitters do it cold turkey and that those nicotine patch’s are addictive, too. You all have my profound sympathy and love. God Bless a smoker.

Heck, 50 percent of the people who have suffered heart attacks due to smoking can’t stop smoking cigarettes. Must we judge them? Do we stop being compassionate to them because they cannot stop? Would we withhold our love or aid?

God Bless you all, and may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand as you make your way through this sexist, elitist, money-buys-happiness wrong-headed society that we live in. I would not have it so. Love Is All There Is ~ Paul

Email Paul and Say Hi!

Quit Smoking Now!
You Can Do It!

Tell All Your Friends You Are Going to Quit
(And Try Not to be Mean While You are Withdrawing.)

Songs About Quitting Smoking
and God’s Grace

"With Or Without You:" U2′s Bono sings his heart out. Dedicated to my old love “C”. — 5:30

"Bad Reputation:" Joan Jett, another “bad girl” sings her rock and roll favorite (not that I have a bad reputation, I just like the song). — 2:42

"Cold Turkey:" Beatles great John Lennon sings his outrageously right on hit live in New York City. — 5:44

"Early Morning Rain:" A live performance by Gordon Lightfoot in Chicago in 1979 of a song that Peter Paul and Mary made famous. — 3:24

The Biology, Morality and Politics
of Addiction

The FreeDomain Radio Interview:
Gabor Maté, M.D.
Visit Dr. Maté’s website

"The Biology, Morality and Politics of Addiction:" Dr Gabor Maté caringly explains the truth to us in this long, but worthwhile and rewarding interview for our understanding. — 48:53

This may well be a very special interview, since I strongly believe Jesus led me to it in terms of having something very on target to share with you. Just so we’re clear, I’ve been addicted to cigarettes. I never in my life ever tried anything that wasn’t prescribed for me except in the distant past I used to occasionally smoke marijuana, but no longer do so. ~ Paul Evans

"Grace Tells Another Story:"Christian rockers Mercy Me sings their heart out in this heartwarming and uplifting track. — 3:34

"Beautiful Day:" U2 sings their heart out on ABC’s Good Morning America live from Fordham University. This is my very favorite song. — 4:14

One of the ideas I was trying to convey here with this article is that it is more important for me to be concerned with helping people than it is for me to be concerned about “how I look”. I mention directly my mental illness, which is looked on very negatively in our society. I guess to some extent, I sacrificed my privacy from the moment I undertook having a website like Evans Liberal Politics.

The fact is, if you want to conclude something negative about me because you are going to view me through a lens of “mental illness” or schizophrenia, I can’t stop you. But I do condemn you if you are apt to judge me that way. Mental illness is best viewed as a set of symptoms, and not a reflection on the decency, caring and soundness of a person’s thinking, am I not right? Sometimes, those symptoms can constitute a reason for holding a negative view on a given person’s soundness of thinking, and I KNOW from bitter experience that almost none of you are going to have read my smoking cessation stories, without viewing them through a lens of “he’s mentally ill you know.”

You’d be wrong to so judge me, but judge me I knew you would (most of you). As I said, it is more important to me as a writer and as a caring person, to express hopeful and helpful ideas to people, and convey a message that I felt might help people — and to do so in full honesty — than were any negative ideas you might have because I am honest and open and do not hide my illness. Look at my website. Conclude if you will: who is ill here, me, or the world?

I don’t feel like a “mentally ill” human being, I feel complete, well and without any symptoms, just so we’re clear. I just got a job. I also do feel like that many of my friends, because I have had problems in the last year, and now find myself dirt poor, interpret many things in my life through a filter which primarily consists of the negatives associated with the labels “mentally ill” and also maybe “addiction”. (cigarettes) That I believe is very wrong of them. Mental illness in the majority of patients is like diabetes. If you “self-monitor” and take care of your “diet”, (get enough sleep, take your medicine, and the self-monitoring is important), the chances are most of the time the disease will be in remission and you will be without symptoms.

Incidentally I deliberately included some “punk” or morally negative songs on the short list above. That was sort of to dare you to think badly of me. Then you were supposed to come to the last song, Mercy Me’s wonderful and uplifting piece, and see that no man is beyond God’s redemption, that God’s love can heal and make right any “wrongness”. As he has for me.

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