As someone who has never so much as taken a single puff in his life, nor ever suffered an addiction of any kind, all I can add is my sincerest encouragement to those who are quitting, and my best wishes for those fighting disease.
It always depresses me when I see the apparent persistence in the popularity of smoking among young teens today. I hope the FDA ultimately wins its battle to acquire the right to regulate tobacco as a legal drug, but the only way kids will stop wanting to light up is through the steady decline in smoking's perceived social acceptability, and this is what we are gradually beginning to see today in the public arena. Adults exercising their personal responsibility to quit is a necessary first step in changing the culture of addiction, intoxication, and self-medication that we have inherited.
Though I find the class-action tobacco lawsuits ridiculous and the ban on certain forms of tobacco advertising hypocritical and probably unconstitutional, and though I feel any adult who wants to should be able to smoke if they like as long as it doesn't infringe upon others, the fact is that if the ratio of non-smokers to smokers becomes high enough, the practice will begin to fade away fast, especially in public. The image of smoking as acceptable, not to mention 'cool', has already begun to fizzle out among adults, and though marketing to younger potential smokers is still strong, it seems the tobacco companies can read the writing on the wall and are trying to diversify as fast as they can. Smoking will never die out entirely, but it will become so expensive and anti-social that only those who can't break their addiction will still do it, and then only in private or when surrounded by other smokers in a pitifully few establishments expressly created to serve only them. Better to get out while the getting's good.
