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Quitting the Demon Weed

How Gestapo techniques helped me stop smoking

David Martin
The Memoirist

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Photo by Reza Mehrad on Unsplash

In the words of the old joke, “It’s easy to quit smoking; I’ve done it a hundred times.”

How easy is it really? From my perspective, easy as pie. The first time I tried to quit, it worked. Here’s how:

For years, I had smoked. Not just social smoking or occasional smoking. I was a real smoker. Two packs a day.

But then in 1984, I decided I had to quit. What was once a pleasurable pastime had become a hard-bitten habit.

So I signed up for a local “stop smoking” course. The course effectively combined elements of group therapy, behavior modification, and Gestapo torture techniques.

Step one for us participants was exploring the mechanism of smoking and identifying our individual smoking patterns. Some people smoked only during the day, some only during the evening, and others only when socializing. I, on the other hand, smoked one cigarette every twenty minutes from the time I woke up to the moment I turned off the bedside lamp.

Step two was to measure the carbon monoxide level of our blood to underscore the deadly nature of our habit. I was the class leader with a CO reading higher than the instructors had ever seen before.

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