I’ve got to hand it to the anti-tobacco lobby. They have single-handedly created a whole industry all for pointing out the effects of smoking tobacco products. I want to say up front I do not endorse smoking in any way, shape, or form. In fact I don’t even have first hand experience of nicotine addiction. I’m just saying because of all the products on the market today to help you supposedly “stop” smoking instead it’s creating a great way to step up to full time tobacco cigarette smoking. Warning: Following these steps may lead to risk of some types of cancers not to mention bad breath, yellow teeth (well I get that from coffee anyways), smell on clothes, loss of a significant amount of money (if you smoke a lot), and increasing expulsion from bars and taverns as they seem to be driving out the smoker more and more every day. For the record this is called nicotine replacement therapy.
Step 1: Nicotine Patch. The first step would be to start with the patch. This is simply because you can forget about it for a while after you put it on. Plus it may go into your bloodstream quicker with a trans-dermal patch. My first thought was to place this second and nicotine gum first because chewing gum is usually enjoyable, however since you have to actually put the gum in your mouth and chew it for any length of time I felt that using the patch would be the easier option since all you have to do is put it on and sort of ‘set it and forget it’. (Of course it’s really not that much easier putting on a patch verses popping gum into the mouth but if you want to just have your nicotine without any conscious effort this would be the option to pick first.) If you’ve never smoked before or somehow ingested nicotine, you may feel sick.
Step 2: Nicotine Gum. Modern chewing gum has been around for over a hundred years, and various forms have been around for about 5000 years. Apparently American Indians would chew the resin of spruce tree sap which was then picked up by New England settlers until 1848 when John B. Curtis developed and sold the first commercial chewing gum. Since we’ve been chewing on things for thousands of years and smokers would often chew gum to keep their mouth busy while quitting cigarette smoking, it was only a matter of time before they started putting nicotine into gum to make quitting smoking a little more enjoyable. So now you want to graduate to gum chewing. While gum chewing is more enjoyable than wearing a patch on your skin, it’s not really any better at getting you addicted to nicotine. So really if you wanted you could swap these steps.
I’d like to speak a little bit about lozenges and sprays. These are more or less similar to the gum. Since an inhaler or a spray would have something in common with electronic cigarettes I’m simply going to talk about e-cigarettes down below. Also chewing tobacco is completely different method of getting nicotine than from smoking. It doesn’t necessarily fit anywhere. Like does it go in between the patch and the gum since there’s chewing involved. Or would it fit between the e-cig and the real cig? My guess is, if you go down this route, once you’re smoking real cigarettes you can transition to chewing tobacco which actually can give you mouth cancer and is a really nasty habit, (I despise chewers and spitting) but for the sake of this article it is worth noting.
Step 3: Electronic cigarettes. What’s better than smoking real cigarettes that stink and make people cough and stuff? Smoking fake cigarettes. Why? Because you don’t get a lot of the bad effects that you can with the other products. I’m not saying they’re good for you, I’m simply saying that since they don’t have all the chemicals to keep them burning and they only release water vapor, you’re not stinking up the place, they’re not necessarily making your teeth yellow, etc. What’s not to like? Okay granted by now you’re probably pretty well addicted to nicotine, you may want to skip this step, because you may want all kinds of cancers, and stinky breath, and yellow teeth, and what not. But if you don’t the next step would be of course the E-cig.
This brings us to the final step. Which is not really a step I guess since it’s the end result we’ve all been waiting for. That’s right smoking tobacco-filled cigarettes. Well here you are, are you proud of yourself? Risking others via second-hand smoke. Driving off those nice girls because you have nasty breath and yellow teeth? Risk getting some types of cancers and dying? If you are then I probably fill sorry for you. Yeah so this article was about getting into smoking by using nicotine-replacement-therapy options, in other words stepping up from the easiest to the hardest. So I wouldn’t wish lung cancer on my worst enemy. So what, you’ve read this far haven’t you? Well shame on you for reading about that. Of course this was all just for entertainment purposes and maybe you learned a little something along the way. And if you didn’t that’s just as well.
Until ‘Monday’