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Blog
Sadie
The four letters of BLUE
The guy in the picture sums up the experience better than any sales pitch. Long gone are images of Mr Handsome lighting a cigarette an inhaling contentedly set in a scenic location. While menthol cigarettes depicted as cool, refreshing beside cascading waterfalls or dewy meadow. Smoking has been proven to age skin, wreck internal havoc and shorten life expectancy. So having established in our minds that smoking is a toxic occupation and not a joy it comes back to why so many people, including me, indulge such a detrimental habit? Addiction is part of it, of course, as has been scientifically proven a thousand times over. Nicotine and all his jolly friends conspire to keep us hooked. No doubt sometimes this is enough to keep someone coming back for more. They are the people who overuse clichés such as 'my grandfather lived to be ninety and smoked forty a day' or 'what's the point in stopping I could go out and be run over by a bus tomorrow,' or 'I know someone who ate well and was a fitness fanatic and they got cancer,' and so on. We've all heard them. Addiction is I believe only part of it. It's an addiction, for sure, if the decision is made and victory is won they then become a smoker who doesn't smoke. Once an addict always an addict and the nicotine receptors in the brain will remain receptive and hungry for each of their remaining years on spent on planet earth. For some, however, the need to smoke enters more complex psychological realms. This area therefore needs to be addressed before any hope of quitting becomes realistic. Without facing our demons and learning how to manage them, not necessarily conquer, we are jump on a 'quit train' going nowhere. …
Why do so many people still smoke cigarettes?
Nick has friends, lots of them, concocted to make a potion by the profiteers to aid his addictive qualities. When you subscribe to inhaling, they have you hooked and it's party time at Nicks place. I have yet to meet a person who smokes who is not aware inhaling the cocktail of ingretients from cigarettes is the number one preventable cause of death in the developed world. I have been one of the multitude for a number of years. Not mentioned yet is the financial implications. Just whose pocket are we lining everytime we light up. It is certainly not our own and at between forty and fifty pence per shot these days we should wonder. The amount of information available to smokers is plentiful on the internet and in leaflet format found in Health Centres along with hundreds if not thousands of books written on the topic. Yet in spite of this overload there remains a band of people dedicatedto the habit. Why? Nick holds recruitment drives every day. He captivates new victims to replace those lost. The lost could be dead, victims of horrible afflictions like emphaseama, or among the growing number of quitters. What ever the reason he has to maintain his ego and engage alluringly with juicy young victims. Nicotine is addictive. We all know that but so too are other chemicals in the mix we claim to enjoy. Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. These cigarette ingredients include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT. Chemical: Found in Nicotine: bug sprays Carbon monoxide: car exhaust Arsenic: rat poison And all the rest. Quite a thought isn't it. Knowing this and translating it into NOT smoking has not yet happened for me. So I have to ask myself why? I freely admit that everytime I replenish supplies there is an element of self loathing. In tomorrows blog post I want to have a closer look at all the reasons people have for continuing to indulge the habit. My theory is it all is rooted in one thing. Something which is not easy to admit but my unofficial survey of the problem is enough to confirm my suspicions. …