“We’ll Always Have Chantix!”

I guess there were lots of items on my plate this past August 25, as I missed a significant anniversary. No matter, I will celebrate on December 25. On that date, it will have been 15 years and 4 months since my last smoke.

I began smoking when I was 16 and finally stopped a few months before my 55th birthday. There were plenty of reasons to stop all along. Health is usually the number one concern, but I never felt any health effects from smoking. That could change later in life. The price of tobacco kept going up and up, thanks to punitive taxes. Smokers were treated like moral lepers. We were consigned to small outdoor areas, even in foul weather. I can remember a brief stop-over at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. It was winter, and I went outside to smoke a quick bowl of pipe tobacco. It was 17 degrees below zero, and I wondered if the bowl of my rather expensive pipe would crack due to the extreme difference in temperature inside the bowl and outside. It was not fun to be a smoker.

In the end, I quit because of a woman. She lived in a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, and I lived in Madison, Georgia. We saw each other for a total of seven weeks spread out over three years, two or three weeks at a time. It was a transcontinental and transpacific fling that was destined not to last. But I did quit smoking because of her.

I was to visit her in the resort town of Coffs Harbour, NSW. I booked my flights, then sat down to do some serious time accounting. I was looking at a bare minimum of 19 hours without a smoke, assuming that one layover gave me a chance to get outside to smoke, and get back through security before the next flight. More realistically, I was looking at 24 hours without smoke. I knew I couldn’t survive that long. That big old 747 would be making an unscheduled landing on some south Pacific island, where the local constabulary would then board the plane to remove me in handcuffs for smoking in the lavatory. No, I couldn’t do that. My only chance was to quit permanently.

The year before, in 2006, I read an article in Chemical and Engineering News on addiction. The nicotine addiction portion of that article was not reassuring: the most successful treatment for smoking cessation was, at the end of one year, only 20% successful. That treatment was Chantix, which required a doctor’s prescription.

Interesting side note: you can no longer get Chantix in a pharmacy: the brand was discontinued after a recall. The recall was for high levels of nitrosamine in the product. Nitrosamine is carcinogenic. For some reason, I find that hilarious! Cigarettes are carcinogenic, and the most successful treatment for cigarette addiction was carcinogenic!

Back to the tale. When I told my doctor that I wanted a prescription for Chantix, he muttered something on the order of “It’s about damned time!” Then he told me that if I was serious about quitting, I would take Chantix for four months.

I started on Chantix the 25th of August, 2007, just about three weeks before my trip to Australia. It was expensive: it was about the same amount of money per month that I had been spending on tobacco. So much for the money I would be saving by not smoking! But I immediately faced a dilemma. My first prescription would run out at the end of my first week in Australia, and no pharmacy there would refill a prescription from a US. pharmacy. If I wanted to continue with Chantix for the four months my doctor recommended, I would have to get a refill before leaving on my trip. That meant laying out another fairly sizable amount of dough. Do I do it, or do I take a chance?

In the end, I took a chance. My one month on Chantix was all that was needed. I haven’t smoked since then.

As for the woman in question, we last saw each other in 2009. We had fun together: in Coffs Harbour, in Hawaii, and at stops up and down the east coast of the US. But this was the very definition of a long-distance relationship, and we all know the common wisdom about long-distance relationships.

But the relationship was worthwhile. Although the relationship died a natural death, I quit smoking because of it, and that ain’t chopped liver.