by Tracee Sioux

I can hardly wait for New Year's Eve to come because I never have to put "Quit Smoking - for real this time" on my list of resolutions again. I can move on to getting organized and saving my receipts so I can deduct them.

The best thing about this year is that I've become a non-smoker. I really and truly quit smoking. Well, maybe the very best thing is that I've encouraged thousands of other smokers, to become non-smokers with the breakout success of one BlogFabulous post about the miracle drug Chantix (around 957 comments). It got so difficult to load up I started a new quit smoking support site at Quit Coping. It feels fantastic to effect the soul of the world in such a positive way.

If you still smoke here's what I want you to know:

You've been underestimating the tole smoking is taking on your emotional life.

The chronic sense of failure, guilt and shame is effecting everything you say, think and do. You've been doing it so long that you think it's who you are.

It's not.

You'll have to take my word for it, but after a few months you'll discover a deeper person underneath all those negative surface emotions and that person is worth knowing.

It's liberating and confidence-boosting to be without that sense of shame, guilt and failure.

Smoking undermined every relationship in my life. If you always leave a conversation to smoke you rob yourself of the full relationship - usually the healing, reconciliation and understanding that comes at the end of conversations.

You think you can't find the emotional strength to deal with people because you've been mentally checking out as soon as conflict comes up by thinking about how you'll escape to smoke.

That you can't deal with stress is a fiction created by your addiction to cigarettes. Period. It's a fiction and it will take some pain and a lot of practice - but you deserve to know that you can deal with everything you think you can't deal with. You can learn to deal with stress, loss, pain, trauma, anxiety, insomnia, conflict, boredom and every other emotion you've avoided by smoking.

You'll need to dedicate yourself to finding new coping strategies for every instance where you previously smoked. That's seriously uncomfortable. It's painful sometimes. It's overwhelming. I promise you - it's worth it.

There is no way to quit smoking with total ease and comfort. But, Chantix will take the edge off. And if you're a smoker, I know you understand that by edge I don't mean a slight discomfort, I mean the depths of hell. Chantix will elevate you to purgatory levels of discomfort which almost feels like heaven if you've ever been to the depths of hell.

Today is the Great International Smoke Out. Ten years ago I ended up on the front page of a Lithuanian newspaper for smoking it up on the street on this day. It's embarrassing to be held up as the epitome of stupidly continuing to smoke.

This year, when I see smokers on the street, I want to tell you: You don't have to smoke anymore.

Stop by Quit Coping and I'll hang with you every step of the way while you give up this self-loathing, self-defeating habit. You deserve to be a non-smoker.

Family Visit and Maturity
Blog Fabulous/Chantix (1,000 comments)
I suck
Addiction Off

by Tracee Sioux

No really, I am a nonsmoker!

To understand just how complete my addiction to smoking was you should read I suck, in which I explain all the f*ed up reasons I completely and totally LOVED smoking.

I credit my non-smoking success to Chantix, a new little-advertised drug that seems to have "turned-off" my addiction. I am not clear how exactly it works, but I suspect it works on the addiction receptor of the brain. You smoke for the first week and then you don't want to smoke anymore. My own unscientific opinion is that smoking during the first week clues in the brain that this is the addiction that needs to be turned off. I am not a doctor so I can't get more scientific than that. But, I think there has been ample evidence to suggest that when a person becomes addicted to something whether it's a drug, alcohol or cigarettes there is a brain receptor which becomes "miswired" if you will and tells your brain "you must have this to lead a happy life."

In addiction recovery, they call it addict thinking or stinking thinking. In recovery one of the things you might learn is how to will yourself into a different thought process. While your brain continues to say, "You need a cigarette," you try to change the thinking to "cigarettes are bad for me" through repetition. It's effective, but it's a painful and tiresome process. It could take literally years of determinedly praying and willing for this method to really be effective. Those years, to my recollection of being dependent on anti-anxiety medication, are painful ones. In no way do they not suck. This pill, Chantix, took 2 months to change the actual thought process about my smoking addiction.

I feel completely cured of my 20 year addiction to cigarettes. I took this twice-daily pill for two months and I have no more need for cigarettes. I even went to visit my whole family for an entire week with a baby in a mini-van, usually a major trigger for me, and didn't even think about smoking. At no time did I want to kill any one of my relatives and no one wanted to kill me, at least not because I was jonesing for a smoke. Before, every time I tried to quit smoking my husband would stash one around the house to toss at me when he felt he couldn't take anymore crap without considering murder or divorce. (Total enabler.)

Considering my previous obsession and/or addiction to smoking my liberation from the habit is a miracle. Not a minor one either. The misery, crankiness, irritability of "trying to quit" for several years was terrible. Simply the fact that I couldn't stop thinking about them as something I needed, (even after quitting for nine months at a time during pregnancies) is a testament to how addicted I felt. After taking Chantix for an easy two months it is as though the addiction has been turned off. Also, I noticed that my desire for other addictive substances is being effected. For instance, my desire for drinking a beer or having a glass of wine has also been greatly reduced.

The relevant piece of information for the non-smoking general public here is that an addiction might be "cured" through medication. Think of the freedom this would provide for millions of people in America and around the world. If Chantix can do this for smokers, what might a similar drug do for the alcoholic? What about the crystal-meth addict? What about people in chronic pain from illness or injuries who avoid taking addictive medications they might safely use if there were a cure for addiction?

Who doesn't know an addict? Who doesn't love an addict? Who prays that their own addict might overcome their addiction? Think of all the people who wouldn't be in prison if they had freedom from their addictions? We could save millions of tax-payer dollars by curing people of their addictions with medication like Chantix. In 2007 alone the President's Drug Control Budget called for $12.9 billion to continue the war on drugs. Think of all the families that might be saved, divorces that might be avoided, children who wouldn't be abandoned, financial ruin that might be skirted if there was a cure for other addictions. Addicts might once again become productive citizens as opposed to the criminals addictions make them become.

I'm someone who has walked the path of being addicted and using substances to pacify feelings until becoming dependent on them. I can speak from a place where I know that addictions can be overcome through Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, therapy, faith, prayer, changes in lifestyle, stress management, rehab and just plain holding on to your ass through recovery, but it's not as easy as it looks. Some people just don't have it in them to do it without medication. Many die, many go to prison, many lose their children, many lose themselves, many stay shackled to their addictions even through sobriety, all are at-risk for relapse.

Medications like Chantix could prove to be a break-through in one of the most destructive health epidemics ever experienced - addiction.