Feeding the Nicotine Monkey

It's been said that cigarette addiction is one of the hardest to break; harder than alcohol, heroin, or crack.

I dunno. I guess it depends on perspective.

Certainly, the more traditionally addictive drugs have more obvious affects on your life. Alcohol has ruined many a million and laid waste their families. Likewise with crack, heroin, or meth...drugs that not only can ravage your health but eventually make you lose everything; job, friends, family, self-respect, freedom. These are clear-cut, but cigarettes...oh...it's got special problems.

For one, it's legal. Not only legal but sold in just about every store in the country. It's cheap (relatively). It's easy to use. While not exactly socially acceptable anymore, being a smoker doesn't endanger your job or your relationships. This is what makes kicking the nicotine addiction so difficult.

In traditional addiction treatment a person goes into some type of facility, typically 28 days, and focuses their entire day-to-day life on recovery from the addiction. They stop using the drug...cold....and suffer the withdrawal in isolation from the real world. They detox, and since detoxing pretty much precludes performing any other daily duties, the treatment facility allows an addict to suspend everything else in their life to concentrate on recovery. It doesn't always work, but it's the best method around. Judges will order people to go into treatment. Employers will even pay for it sometimes. Even the state will provide it if there is no insurance.

But cigarette addiction? You're on your own, baby.

All my training in addiction counseling tells me that the one sure fire way of getting over an addiction is to stop using the drug you are addicted to....but I still have to function...so I have to go the riskier route of tapering off while adjusting my behavior. Thus, I go for the nicotine replacement like offered in these lozenges....
....which don't work worth a crap for me. The down side of these little things are that you can't eat or drink 15 minutes before or after having one and they take about an half hour to dissolve in your mouth. I suppose that this does help me from munching on snacks rather than smoking, but the real downside is that I always have a choice when thinking about popping one of these things in my mouth. Do I suck on one of these vile pills or do I have a cigarette? I guarantee, during a stressful time of the day when I am really craving a shot of nicotine...I'll probably opt for a cig.

So, I got some of these......
...which, though they only deliver a small stream of nicotine through the day rather than the instant hit my brain craves, has the advantage of giving me that nicotine no matter what I'm doing. It also has the unintended advantage of making you as sick as a dog if you decide to cheat and start smoking while you are wearing the patch. For me...that reduces the temptation of buying a pack when the day gets especially rough.

We'll see.