Mn Smoking Ban Effects on Truckers

I quit in '04 after smoking for 13 years. I was only 30, but a blood clot in my lung that put me in ICU for 2 days, with a total hospital stay of 12 days made me quit. Though the clot was not caused by smoking the damage done by it was enought to make me quit. No need to add things on.

 

You bet... a zealot is a zealot, the very worst of the lot. I quit Marlboros because my friend could not stand the smell, he taught me to hand roll cigarettes with Three Castles tobacco and ZigZag papers.

I never had nicotine stains on my fingers before I started rolling my own smokes with the VERY best tobacco money could buy, true Virginia tobacco.

Three Castles was the top of the crop and had to be shipped to England where is was processed and then resold in the U.S. You could not purchase such fine quality tobacco in Virginia, it had to be exported and reimported.

I tell you, no filter was necessary with really good tobacco. My teacher was Rick Rabineau, he learned to roll with various experts and was a perfectionist, his cigarettes exceeded anything a factory could make. It took awhile before I learned the technique but I learned it and to this moment could roll as well as my deceased friend. Rick died at 49 from cancer--not lung cancer in the usual sense for his age. His cancer was the lung cancer of someone who out lived non small cell. He did not suffer with COPD, he went way past that and years earlier.

You cannot purchase really good tobacco in the U.S. anymore, Three Castles will not import or defend their product, they announced that it was too risky. Thankfully, that was after I had already quit. Otherwise, I would likely have moved to New Zealand to smoke.

I do not know where you can purchase true tobacco anymore but the various American Indian reservations are not bound by oridinary civil laws, they were propitiators of using tobacco so may have a line on something.

A bit more about not doing something... I gained a LOT of weight and my cholesterol was obscene in the early part. I went from 178-180 to 240. Yep way fat, way fast. I substituted Bryers ice cream for nicotine. It is a poor trade but it was my trade.

I ate at least 25 gallons of ice cream during the period of time it took to realize that I was not smoking anymore. The beauty of it was in the cholestrol tests. I was definitely done with smokes after all that ice cream but the blood tests were awful, I figured, any port in a storm. When the Doc wanted to medicate me for cholesterol I took up cooking.

Losing weight was not as inconvenient as not smoking. I did not want to smoke anymore. Keeping the weight would have been Ok, I just turned my nervous energy to learning to cook low fat, no fat food. It took about six months to lose the weight for me but, who cares, the cigarettes were gone and the food was good.

I still make ice cream, not more than a couple of times a year, it is always a big deal too, folks remember how it was to have fresh ice cream.

It all settles down though. No one was a smoker in elementary school, you go back as far as you need too and find a place in your mind where did not smoke, go forward from there and be glad for what you have!

 

Even now, I will see someone else smoking, and my mind thinks that it looks like it would be very satisfying to light one up. Nicotine is one helluva drug.

 

You can have my Marlboros when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.
I did the whole quit smoking thing in Basic. That sucked.
Once I got Out of basic, training I went right back to the cigarette. Through the years, I have cut back an awful lot.
I uesd to be a two pack a day Smoker.
Now it takes me 2 days, sometimes 3, to smoke a whole pack.
I don't even smoke a whole cig most of the time. Just a couple of drags, then put it out, save it for later.
Then there are those really bad days. When I just gotta have a whole one to keep me sane. lol

 

I wish I could quit
I could'nt afford Marlboros any more so i got a rollin machine and roll Southern cross light in full flavor tubes. Taste ok but man I am sick of rollin....and coughin ....and hacken....and being out of breath.
I tell my kids dont start ever. I started at 10 or 12 but it was cool in1975
at 65 cents a pack. With todays constant dont smoke crap I dont think they will but......who knows. $5.06 a pack around here.
I am gettin fat already if I quit then what I ll blow up!!!!!

 

I have been free of old Nick O' Teen for the past ten months.
LIKE HELL! I haven't had a drag on a cigarette, cigar or pipe for the past ten months, but I sure haven't been "free!"

I crave them. I am a veteran cigar smoker. Not the big expensive Rush Limbaugh kind, but the cheap seven to ten a day kind. For over thirty years.

I gave them up the last day of last year. I think. Maybe. I'm still not sure that I won't go down and buy a five pack right after this post.

It has been a continual struggle, one that I have fought every #### day since I stopped.

My brother died of lung cancer at 57. (I'm now 60 and still going strong,) but felt it was time to quit. Now, I'm not so sure. I've put on a lot of weight, despite hard work and MORE exercise.

I've no use for the "goody two shoes" who insist on telling other folks how to live their lives!