<p>My daughter started smoking when she went away to college and it makes me sick. She would never smoke in front of me because I would need to find the urge to make her eat them. Horrible, horrible habit and we have watched so many people in our family die from cancer. It literally drives me to tears that she smokes.</p>
<p>I just want to be clear. I understand that there are some people who can smoke and walk away from it. However, I also understand nicotine addiction enough to state, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that any person picking up a cigarette in the next hour (whether it’s the first ever, their first in the last 20 minutes, or their first in a year) should assume that lighting it means an affirmative decision to smoke all day, every day, for the rest of their lives, unable to quit, until it kills them. Yes, they might be able to quit tomorrow. But, if they plan to quit someday, then why light the cigarette today? It’s never “easier” to quit tomorrow and there are no guarantees that a nicotine addict will be able to quit. There are people smoking 'til their last breath from lung cancer or emphysema. You think they don’t want to quit?</p>
<p>I would rather have my kid on anti-anxiety meds than have him smoking.</p>
<p>I’m so sorry, Donna. I know you have a great kid, but they all disappoint us sometimes.
If only we could instill in them the wisdom it has taken us a half-century to gain.</p>
<p>If this were one of my kids, I’d sit down with them, maybe at a nice restaurant or favorite spot, and tell them how much their smoking concerns and hurts me. I’d tell them I would do just about anything to convince them to quit, and anything at all to help them accomplish it. I’d come armed with a pile of articles and papers showing the health statistics related to smokers. I’d let them know that getting them to quit smoking is the most important thing in my life at this time, because they are the most important thing in my life. I’d no doubt get resistance and dismissal. But I’d stick with it, and not ever let it seem like it’s ok, because the health effects are very real. Heart disease, lung cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer for women, all have named smoking as risk factors. </p>
<pre><code>I looked up my first high-school boyfriend online a few years ago. He was such a great guy. I have to say that the primary reason I didn’t want to keep up with our relationship after his family moved up north is because he smoked. It just seemed so dumb to me, and reflected what I perceived as a character flaw. I can’t tell you how sad I was to read his obituary in the San Francisco papers I found online a couple of years ago. He left two beautiful kids and a wife at age 56 after a five year battle with lung cancer. He missed seeing his kids get married, grandchildren, and what might have been the best years of his life. All for a stupid cigarette.
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<p>I know you have built a wonderful relationship with your son, but I wouldn’t tiptoe around this issue just to keep the peace. Some things are worth creating a bit of discord and discomfort in a relationship, and a serious threat to health is one of them. He knows you love him, and any disapproval regarding his smoking is not going to change that.</p>
<p>I agree that anyone who smokes a cigarette should assume they might get addicted, but most people do not make that assumption when they try a cigarette. I wonder if a poll was taken, how many people do try just one puff or one cigarette and that is it. One of my kids (unwisely in my opinion) did that at college. Just one. And that was it. I guess he just needed to see for himself, I’m not sure. Maybe the endless DARE programs of his childhood made him curious. Maybe it’s because people try things in college. I wasn’t happy about it, but it was after the fact when I found out. I’d be interested in knowing the statistics about how many people who try one puff or one cigarette end up as smokers and how many don’t. That, in my opinion, is the part that’s Russian Roulette – not knowing if you will get addicted right away or not. But I’m betting a lot of people walk away thinking it’s not for them or wondering why anyone would spend money and risk their health on it. How many people can say, as I can, that they never once took a puff of a cigarette? Probably not that many which leaves a large group who took a puff and didn’t get addicted. Obviously, it’s wisest not to try at all.</p>
<p>Allen Carr makes the point that no smoker, not one, ever made the conscious decision to become a full-time smoker, smoking all day, every day, for their entire lives. In fact, every smoker starts out believing that they can quit anytime they want to. They’ll quit when they go to college. Or when they get married. Or when they have children. They all think it’s just “for now, and then, I’ll quit…”</p>
<p>Of course, it’s like that. Who, in their right minds, would make a conscious decision to start smoking if they understood the trap of the addiction? Smokers aren’t stupid. They know it’s killing them. They see the looks. They know what it costs. They are trapped. Almost always, trapped beginning with that first puff as a teen that sets an inevitable process in motion.</p>
<p>I reread my post and think I was unclear about the “just one puff and that is it” which could be “that’s it and there was never another” or “that’s it and was addicted for life.” I meant the former – just trying it once and not again.</p>
<p>Growing up my parents smoked 5 packs a day between them. Dad quit 33 years ago and Mom 21. They can not imagine how they could afford to smoke now. None of their 5 kids ever smoked a cigarette.</p>
<p>My son smoked in HS and into college. It upset me more than anything else he did (and he did a lot). I reminded him that I always made sure that he had only the best – breastfeeding, homemade organic baby food, lots of fresh air and exercise, and I didn’t do all that to so he could trash his body. I think that eventually sank in. That and chronic sinus infections and stomach problems. It became hard for him to deny the damage the smoking was doing to his body.</p>
<p>Physician here. Wish I could get every teenage (and older) smoker to see the effects of smoking. Not just cancer (of more than one kind) and heart disease, but the man in his 50’s who hurt while breathing but would die from pain medicine, etc. Unfortunately the young think they are immortal, nothing dire in the future seems real. I doubt anything would make him quit-even a blood gas sample showing his carbon monoxide levels after one cigarette. </p>
<p>There is a psychological reason he is smoking- he needs to redirect his tension relief to something safer. How to do this? Don’t know. My mother never got to be a grandmother because she smoked- died at 53, my brother smokes instead of a childhood habit.</p>
<p>Donna- my sympathy for you, wish I had answers you could use.</p>
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<p>I smoked for 17 years, and this was precisely the “A-HA!” moment I had which made me quit. I had an epiphany ---- I’m either going to smoke for the rest of my life, or quit “SOME DAY”. Since I knew I was going to quit “SOME DAY”, and I knew it was never going to get any easier, I just quit right then and there. It made perfect sense. I will say, however, that you need to have that epiphany, and you have to want to quit.</p>
<p>It helped that my husband quit on the same day. Having that dual support was what made us successful on our first try, IMO.</p>
<p>I think my previous post was unclear. I was not trying to sound as if it is “no big deal” (it is), but I mentioned my friends quitting smoking after college because I wanted Donna to know that hopefully her S would do the same and that it is possible. I agree with all of you that smoking is a terrible addiction and I can’t think of a single positive reason to smoke, but many reasons not to.</p>
<p>Wis–my dad never got to be a grandfather because of smoking. he never met his wonderful son-in-law. He neve saw me graduate HS or college. Heck, he didn’t even see me *start *high school. It still makes me sad, and I’ll admit it, a bit angry.**</p>
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<p>We have a china armoire that belonged to H’s parents. When they died, H wanted it, so it ended up with us. I think we left it out in the garage or in the basement for about a year before moving it up to the dining room with hopes some of the smoke odor would dissipate. It really did for the most part, but whenever we open the glass doors (which is maybe a handful of times a year) we get a whiff of the cigarette smoke.</p>
<p>However, the following story is true, and to this day, I have no way to explain it. My 57-year old sister-in-law died sixteen months ago from metastatic cancer with an unknown origin. I knew her for more than 25 years, although we never really lived in the same town during that time as my family moved away from the area they lived. I was absolutely dumbfounded after the funeral, when talking with another of my brothers, to find that she’d been a heavy smoker. I’ve actually stayed in their house overnight. Evidently, when she was diagnosed with cancer, and was in the hospital, they were maximizing the use of nicotine patches (which is when this brother found out she was a smoker, too) and she still wanted to leave the hospital because she wanted to get home so she could smoke. I think my brother that she was married to was the only one (other than some of her friends and maybe her own parents) who knew she smoked (no one on my side of the family knew). I have no idea how she covered it up, although it did explain why she’d often arrive and depart separately from him at family events, probably so she could escape to her car when she needed to.</p>
<p>Again, I have no way to explain it, but learned people can smoke and hide it from others very successfully.</p>
<p>wis:</p>
<p>Unfortunately, telling smokers about the health risks won’t make them quit (at least until they are old enough to really start experiencing the declining health and fitness). Smokers know that smoking will kill them, but the addiction and the all-consuming physical need for the drug teaches them to block that out. Telling them about health risks raises their stress levels and makes them want to go smoke a cigarette to get the relief of the “pow” when the nicotine hits their brain 8 seconds after the first puff.</p>
<p>I agree that it takes an “ephinany” which is really a moment when you understand that all the excuses are just BS junkie lies and you know what you have to do. I disagree that you have to “want” to quit at the moment you quit. You have to get there pretty quickly, but I didn’t want to quit the night I took my last puff. In fact, I had just come back from a midnight run to the store to buy two packs. I took one puff of the first cigarette from the first of those packs, put it out, and that was the last puff I ever took. I had no intentions or even thoughts of quitting smoking. I hadn’t even thought about quitting for over 20 years. Most successful quitters stop on the spur of the moment with no advance planning whatsoever. Recent studies that show the people who quit without even planning to do so as little as an hour in advance are twice as likely to still be ex-smokers at 12 months as those who plan their quits as advised by government policy in both the US and the UK.</p>
<p>This, of course, has the health professionals in a tizzy because these spur of the moment quitters don’t use pharmaceutical nicotine products and don’t follow health service recommendations to plan their quitting a month in advance so they can “practice”. (What a joke, trust me, you don’t need or want to practice nicotine withdrawal. That just adds to the total misery). The response to these new surveys is to recommend methods of more widespread availabilty of pharmaceutical nicotine to “help” these spur of the moment quitters. They don’t even consider the possibility that these quitters are experiencing higher success rates BECAUSE they aren’t following the recommended pharmaceutical based treatments. </p>
<p>In my opinion, if you believe that you can’t “give up” cigarettes without “help”, then you’ve already lost the psychological battle.</p>
<p>I gave up smoking on about three minutes notice at 8:12 PM on December 7, 1982. My husband–then my boyfriend–leaned over as I was smoking what turned out to be my second-to-last cigarette and said “you’re going to have to choose: me or cigarettes.” I said “can I finish this one?”</p>
<p>I decided then that I would allow myself two more cigarettes in my life, just in case I was ever in front of a firing squad. I’ve had one of them. I have one more.</p>
<p>Things have not been so desperate (yet) that I want that cigarette badly enough to have my last-ever cigarette, but after almost 28 years I’d still have it if I were going in front of the firing squad 
Some days are worse than others. Mostly it’s not an issue at all but I still dream about smoking from time to time. </p>
<p>When people were forced to quit–in concentration camps–some of them quit for as long as seven years and then went right back. Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known to humans. <a href=“http://www.nida.nih.gov/PDF/TobaccoRRS_v16.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nida.nih.gov/PDF/TobaccoRRS_v16.pdf</a></p>
<p>When my daughter smoked one cigarette some five or six years back and left a butt in the ashtray of her car, my husband went completely ballistic. I was of the mind that it was her choice, blah blah blah----his attitude was so angry and so horrified that she quit immediately and has never smoked again. (She talked to me about how angry he was not that long ago.) </p>
<p>DonnaL: I know you’re trying to be rational and all that… but is this really a time to be rational? Don’t you really just want to tell your son off for sheer stupidity?</p>
<p>If I were going to a firing squad at dawn, I wouldn’t want a cigarette. I have completely changed the way I think about cigarettes. I don’t feel like I “gave up” anything. I feel like I took off a ball n’ chain that I had been dragging around.</p>
<p>Lots of ex-smokers don’t want to hate cigarettes. Most of them go back to smoking because they are doing it on willpower. If you really see nicotine addiction for what it is, you can’t help but despise the very thought of smoking.</p>
<p>I am disappointed that so many of you keep telling Donna that there is nothing she can do to make her son stop smoking. Sure she can’t make him, but that doesn’t mean she can’t try to help him find the AHA moment. Telling him all the gory statistics hasn’t helped, pleading with him hasn’t help. She needs to get creative, she needs ideas. Unfortunetly, she can’t use dmd77 husband’s method, more then one kid would choose smoking over a nosy parent. But does anybody have any other ideas?</p>
<p>As Carroll O’Connor said when his son died of a drug addiction, If you love them, you have to keep trying, even if they hate you, you have to save their lives.</p>
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<p>I bought a china cabinet from a good friend of mine – it had been in her parents’ house for almost fifty years, and both were heavy smokers. I started wiping it down with Murphy’s Oil Soap and what came off on the rags was decades of tar and nicotine. I scrubbed and scrubbed through layers of the orange-brown mess. I found if I didn’t wear gloves, my skin absorbed the stuff and I got jittery like I’d been smoking. My kids were 12 and 13 at the time, and imagining the cr*p on the rags in their lungs was a better argument for not smoking than I could ever make. They even asked to take the rags in to school for health class.</p>
<p>I know this doesn’t help you, Donna, but Terri’s comment reminded me of the cabinet. That said, it’s fine with me to be angry with your son, and to set limits on what you will allow in your home.</p>
<p>Isn’t it kind of part of the “hipster” image among boys today to smoke? My kids don’t, but I started smoking in my early twenties to keep my weight down. (Do you think that might be a possible reason for your son?).Totally stupid, yes. I tried to quit a few times and was pretty successful around age 32 (although I kept a pack in the fridge for “emergencies” for a long time). When pregnant with my first child I quit for good. </p>
<p>While we were dating, my H professed he didn’t mind the smell, etc. It took a male co-worker at the time to finally talk sense into me–“you’re trying to be model-skinny and you are really not built to be that skinny” etc.–all true. He was relentless. That’s what worked. </p>
<p>Coincidentally, I saw a commercial on tv today proclaiming that smoking addiction is a “medical disorder” or some such term. There are lots of products available today that make it much easier to quit (as I’m sure you know).</p>
<p>I’d be upset too if my sons smoked. Good luck!</p>
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<p>There are lots of products available that are highly profitable to big pharma and soak up virtually all the dollars in smoking cessation today. Whether they make it “easier to quit” is open to considerable debate.</p>