Ten years ago, I decided that I should stop smoking. Before this decision, I had never given it a second thought. ‘Want to step outside for another? Yes please.’ Who cared about the wind blowing in from the Urals as we huddled around a lighter? Not I. Had I been ready to quit now, a new directive from the NHS, announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday, offers smokers a free pill, varenicline, which notionally works by ‘binding to receptors in the brain to stop people craving or enjoying nicotine’. The decision to offer pills is part of the ‘prevention is better than cure’ narrative also being rolled out to tackle the NHS’s other great funds drain, obesity.
You can still smoke outside pubs, Starmer says, but not outside schools or hospitals. As if I would have lit up there anyway
Well, I’ve tried the anti-smoking pills, and I’m not impressed. The doctor I saw ten years ago gaily applauded my decision and, after unsuccessfully trying to fob me off with meditation techniques and the NHS Stop Smoking app, prescribed me Champix, a branded version of varenicline. One pill a day and you won’t want a fag ever again was the gambit. As a rookie to ‘nicotine cessation’, I thought I had it taped. No lining up in the queue of shame at Boots to buy Nicorette patches for me. No sucking on the white contraption that I always thought looked like a miniature crack pipe. No endless chewing of gum through gritted teeth while watching smokers puff outside amid gusts of laughter. I would just be, quite suddenly and seamlessly, a non-smoker.
For the first few days, I swallowed the pill and lectured anyone who would listen on its merits. Buoyed up by a newfound sanctimony and the belief that I had been ‘cured’ by science, I didn’t smoke. On approximately day four, I started to feel sick as a parrot. Being childless at this time, I was yet to endure the agony of feeling sick for months on end without remedy. I began to feel affronted by the pills and their blue and green packet and not a little scared. On day five, when I felt too sick to eat, the prospect of a cigarette appeared, mirage-like through the gloom. But wait! Wasn’t I meant to be put off smoking for life? How could this be? The first cigarette back – as any long-term relapsing smoker will attest to – felt strange but good; an old friend summoned by a click of flame like a genie. I threw the Champix in the bin and resumed normal service. Champix, I have since discovered, has now been withdrawn from the UK and Europe due to ‘an impurity’. Impurity of effect, perhaps.
Since my Champix ordeal, I have made other and varied attempts to stop smoking. I have, amazingly, managed to stop smoking entirely when pregnant with my two children but this has always been thanks to a hormonal helping hand. As soon as I have suitably recovered from various surgeries and released from breastfeeding, I have turned back to the fags; one of the longest and happiest (if not ruinously expensive) relationships of my life. When I turned 40, I decided that enough was enough yet again and began another bid to stop. That time, I duly slapped on the Nicorette patches and waited to feel as if I didn’t need the soothing paraphernalia of cigarettes and lighter to get through the day. When it didn’t come, I lit up anyway forgetting I had a patch on my arm and, weirdly, my back, and nearly collapsed from nicotine overload. In desperation, I turned to the miniature crack pipe and sucked on it as if my life depended on it to the great amusement of one friend who said I should just have a cigarette instead because at ‘least it would look more elegant’. Due to my age, possibly, I have never tried vaping, a practice I consider it really to be for Gen Z. Give me the real thing any day.
So where does this leave me now? My next attempt to quit is surely on the horizon as smoking is becoming increasingly hard work: you can still smoke outside pubs, Starmer says, but not outside schools or hospitals. As if I would have lit up there anyway, frankly, but the writing is on the legislative wall unless I become a full-time cigarette recusant. I would certainly refuse any prescription to varenicline should a GP offer it to me in the future because I know this: no pill, bitter or sweet, can fix the longing to metaphorically exhale your troubles. For that, there’s God, or, failing that, stop-smoking guru Allen Carr. In other words, it’s an inside job like all addictions. Prevention is better than cure, yes, but some of us are way, way past that, Mr Streeting.
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