Ink Pen by Phil Dunlap for March 20, 2020

Ozzy Osborne who should know once said quitting heroin was easier than quitting cigarettes.

I tried quitting a dozen times with no luck. Then one day I pulled 1/2 a butt out of my pocket, lit it up and it tasted horrible. I put it out and never smoked again. I was up to 3 packs a day at the time. Considering the cost of a pack now, I’m glad I quit.

At the age when most people start smoking, I was hanging out with this girl who smoked and I was trying to “get next to” her. Well, I was trying to be cool and asked her for a cigarette. I had never smoked before so I lit up and took a full, deep drag of my first cigarette…it end up being my last cigarette as well. By the time I stop gagging and coughing I knew that I would never smoke again and thankfully, I never have.

Yup. Didn’t the Marlboro Man eventually die?

Oh… hey…. it’s easy to quit…. I quit at least two dozen times over the years… yep, easy to quit, hard-to-nearly impossible to stay quit. I’d quit, really believing that this time it would be forever….and then within one day or two days ….once, even two weeks, sometimes within an hour …..I’d start smoking again…. It took a family member’s near death from ARDS that gave me the backbone ….the commitment I needed to quit permanently. That was in 1999. The first two years of not smoking were agony, fighting to stay quit every day. Looking at the cost of cigarettes today, I’m so glad that that is one expense I no longer have…. this isn’t really a humblebrag… It’s just a story that proves it can be done for those of us who are and were the worst addicted to nicotine. Make no mistake, oh, it can be done…. but it is as hard as anything I’ve ever done . For me the only other addiction that is harder to quit thsn cigarettes is my addiction to sugar but that’s another story. Unfortunately, I’m still eating sugar.