Balancing on the Stub        (D  F  NL)

How it feels to really maintain one's New Year's resolutions *

I smoked my first cigaret because I wanted to be a rebel, feel the freedom of the Marlboro Mann in the *Weiten* of the Wild West.

Actually, it was not a cigaret at all that I lit up. My starter drug was a *Rohrkolben, also named ... or ..., that I'd pulled from the reet at the lake. I'd filled it with tobacco and smoked it behind the rhododendrons in the garden of my parents. Even in the village of Pinneberg, in the deepest province of Northern Germany, I now felt the promise of adventure, despite my coughing.

It was the end of the eighties. I soon switched to Camel, then to West Lights. There I stood, in the smokers corner of the school yard, and dreamt after the smoke *Schwaden. I now was a proud smoker.

I reacted stubborn to teachings *Belehrungen. My family pleaded *bettelte, friends insisted *drängten, and as a student in the USA, complete foreigners asked me whether it were not the proper time to stop. Till now I can't stand missionary Americans.

I smoked a lot and I liked smoking. I loved these time-outs, this short *Herauslösen from the daily routines, this feeling of distant floating above realities. I shared everything with my cigaret: happiness, misfortune, nervousness, work, *Genuss - she was part of my life. I devised cuddly names: ciggie, zippy, lolly, fuse. During the night I got up for her, and in the morning she was my first thought. Most people didn't know me without this thing in my face. I didn't have yellow teeth or a stinking breath - I looked after that.

*Irgendwann One day I'd become a "20 pack-year smoker", according to the denomination of science when they investigate lung cancer risk groups. For more than 20 years I smoked a packet a day.

Then I stopped.

I've to write this sentence twice, that's how happy it makes me: THEN I STOPPED.
Because I could no longer stand the fear of illness, suffering and death. Because this dependence made me crazy, this "I cannot exist without nicotine" - though I should be "I die because of nicotine".

How? Simply like that. It happened at New Year's eve, two years ago. I wasn't prepared. I don't even believe in it. Just before midnight - on the horizon I saw the first rockets - I chucked the last cigarette into the river Spree. It was very easy because I knew; at the latest in three days I'd be feeble again, I'd be hooked again.

But this time it was different from the previous trials, as weaning guru Allen Carr had died from lung cancer, as I double-underligned every second prhase in his book and nevertheless couln't stop. As I underwent acupuncture, therapy, hypnosis. This time - this time it lasts till today.

Since one year and more than eleven months I'm off it. Every morning - at coffee and paper time - I open an app on my smartphone which calculates how many cigarettes I haven't smoked since that time (over 22000), how much money I saved (almost 5500 Euros) and how much additional extra life time I gained (6 months and 29 days).

The app doesn't tell me that I gained more kilogrammes than I smoked cigarettes a day because I replaced one dependence by another. My app doesn't tell me that. That does my mirror image.

Nevertheless my weaning makes me proud, though I know that my victory may possibly be only temporary. I'm not across the hill. Till now I love the odour of smoke and tobacco, and sometimes I ask a smoker to puff in my direction. The longing for the old life is here. I'm not pleased about that - but claiming the opposite would be lying.

So till today - although I no longer smoke - I am a smoker, a dried-up one, if you like.

Longing and pride are the reasons why I recently joined self-help group, the NicA, Nicotinians Anonymous. We meet every Wednesday and support each other to master daily life without nicotine. We don't say Sir and Madam. We don't ask questions. We talk about everything. Each of us has a mentor whom he can call in case of emergency, also in the middle of the night. In my group there are people who smoke, who stopped smoking, and those who started smoking again after six years of abstinence, because of one single cigarette, thinking they'd been over it.

My contributions begin with: "I am Fiona, and I'm nicotine-dependent." That's a brutal statement, but it's correct. I'm leading a life in the balance on the stub. I can only maintain the balance with the help of like-minded. From time to time I'm asking myself why there aren't more groups as mine. In Germany there are living an estimated 20 million smokers. But there are only a handfull of such groups.

Recently I said: "I'm Fiona, and I'm nicotine-dependent. If one day - against all expectations - I will be very old I will start smoking again." My last breaths with the stub. It sounds mad but I'm already enjoying that moment.

Fiona Ehlers (translation Helmut Lubbers)

Many thanks to Fiona Ehlers for this account! She describes what cigarette companies know very well but the "authorities" don't (want to?) understand. Children start smoking because of publicity, as a pubertarian reaction against the parents' authority, and because of the bad example.
That's why the tobacco multinationals complete agree with buying and smoking bans for children under 16 or 18, as far as tabacco is not completely free, as is the case in many developing countries.
These bans only confirm their colossal lie that smoking would be the free choice of adults. Nothing is less true. If one hasn't started smoking till the age of 18, the chance is smaller than ten percent that one will still start smoking.
The naïve (?) authorities are wasting our money with almost useless warnings not to start smoking or the equally useless advice to stop.
The lobbyists in Bern, Berlin and Brussels still manage to block or delay effective measures, such as absolute publicity bans, smoking bans inside and outside, and neutral, no-frills packaging.