I used to smoke cigarettes. I used to smoke a great many cigarettes. But I had to stop. Not for health reasons, although there was more than enough warnings to go around about how truly dangerous smoking actually was. So, I smoked.
The reader may well ask ‘Why’? The answer is of course, truly simple: I was an addict. Some fifty-odd years ago, I was the Engineering Manager for an electrical construction company. A very successful company, but the word ‘successful’ meant long hours either in an office, or traveling sometimes thousands of miles to sort and supervise projects across Southern Africa.
The work was stressful, and, like any addict does, I told myself that the smoking helped me get my work done, helped me get back sometimes really late, where I’d miss my growing family times because the kids were already in bed by the time I got back: and my wife brought me my dinner after reheating it, because I was so late.
But times and nations change, and I foresaw that the South Africa I had lived in for sixteen years was going to change, and the black man’s vote was coming, because the Afrikaner Government was the target of Liberal Western pressure.
So, I made my plans, with my wife and young family, and came back to England. But before I had even made plans to sell our house, I knew I had to stop smoking. Why? Pure economics. I smoked 70 cigarettes a day, and spent the equivalent, in British money, of £7.50 for 500 smokes, but you must recall that that was 45 years ago. But to buy 500 smokes in England would then have cost £62.50: which I knew was, for me, out of reach, even with the salaries I was expecting,
The tax segment of the price which British smokers pay is important for a couple of reasons. The first is, as always, important because it funds a fair chunk of the Government’s spending plans. It is always a slightly alarming amount because the cash comes from a tax grab paid by an alarming number of people who seemingly either do not care, or actually ignore, what their addiction WILL do to them.
The second is that they don’t seem to understand that smoking DOES directly produce cancer in their lungs. True, not everybody who smokes gets cancer, but the vast majority of smokers are living on borrowed time. It is not an easy death: it is a painful, lingering, obscene death. Smoking in GB&NI costs, on average, around £16.45 for 20 cigarettes, with some brands cheaper, but some, so-called Premium brands charging as much as £20.00 for 20 smokes.
I accept that I stopped smoking for purely financial reasons, and once I had stopped by simply saying “NO MORE SMOKES”, after around three weeks I recovered my senses of smell and of taste; I’ve never looked back. You might think that when the average smoker realises that they are paying the Government somewhere around 85-90% in taxes of the £16.45 per 20 smokes they might just pause, and reflect that they could be doing something better than ensuring an early, painful death, as well as paying the Government the cash which will, unfortunately, help to pay for their final pain-ridden time on this Earth in an NHS hospital.
Have you, dear reader, ever stepped back from the service counter of the average Chemist’s premises, and taken a look at the INDUSTRY which purports to help you stop smoking? The ranks of pills, filters, patches, gum, lozenges, inhalers, or sprays, often combined with nicotine-free prescription medicines (varenicline, bupropion) for best results, plus vaping as a safer alternative to smoke, alongside distraction items like gum, water, or activities to manage cravings. They are probably not going to help you stop, but they are certainly making someone very rich.
Take it from one who stopped, in the ONLY way which really works. All it takes is will power; all it takes is a small but vital dose of that secret additive known, to the wise as COMMON SENSE.
