After graduation in 1968, I went on a senior class trip to the East Coast, mainly D.C. (we stayed in Arlington) and New York City. My first (and last) trip to the Big Apple. We stayed at the Taft Hotel in Times Square. This was before Giuliani cleaned it up. There was this one prost…. but I digress. I had been smoking at that time about a year, a victim of peer pressure by some sleazy criminal types I worked with at the hamburger stand. When I went on the trip, smokes were about $.40 per pack here. In New York, this is 50 years ago, they were already $2.50. Minimum wage was $1.25/hour. Figure it out.
I smoked 2 packs a day for almost 40 years. It didn’t matter how much it cost or how broke I was, I always found the money for cigarettes. If it was -20 outside and I had 2 cigs left to last until tomorrow I’d get dressed and drive to the gas station to make sure I didn’t run out. Take it from one who knows….nicotine is as addictive as heroin. I used to get so aggravated when they raised the price of smokes because it was never a dime or a quarter. It was always a dollar at a time. “It’s to get people to quit smoking,” they said.
Bullshit.
Smokers are the most overtaxed and underrepresented people in the country. All this is is an easy way to raise more money for your friendly neighborhood politicians to piss away, because only 1/4 of the population smokes and non-smokers couldn’t care less.
NYC hikes price of pack of cigarettes to $13, highest in US
“We are sending a loud and clear message that we will not let their greed kill any more New Yorkers without a fight,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a bill signing ceremony at a Brooklyn hospital. “These new laws will not only help reduce the number of smokers in our city, but also save lives.”
WHAT A CROCK. THIS IS ANOTHER MONEY GRAB BY THIS STINKING COMMIE AND HIS DEMOCRAT FRIENDS.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nyc-hikes-price-of-pack-of-cigarettes-to-13-highest-in-us/2017/08/28/df312c3c-8c2a-11e7-9c53-6a169beb0953_story.html?utm_term=.f6e85a043af2
THEY ESTIMATE AT LEAST 70% OF CIGARETTES SOLD IN GOTHAM ARE BROUGHT FROM PLACES LIKE NORTH CAROLINA WHERE CIGARETTES ARE HALF WHAT THEY ARE IN THIS LIBERAL SEWER.
I neglected my health for years because I didn’t have insurance. I couldn’t sleep, I had trouble breathing, and I began passing out for no reason. That happens when your heart stops completely for a few seconds. On March 8, 2013, I was in the shower. My wife heard a thump and came in the bathroom. She pulled back the curtain and I was lying in the bottom of the tub and didn’t remember anything. She told me to get dressed and she took me to the ER. Nine days later I was released. I had a pacemaker for my irregular heartbeat, pills for the Type II diabetes they told me I had, an oxygen machine for my severe emphysema, and a V-Pap machine for my severe sleep apnea.
My first day there the cardiologist, who assisted when I had my quadruple bypass in 2004, came into my room and we talked.
“How many grandchildren do you have?”
“Seven.”
“Here are your choices. Quit smoking and play with the kids outside, or continue smoking and they can visit you while you sit in a chair with an oxygen tube in your nose.”
When my wife came to see me that day I told her I had a full pack of cigarettes and a lighter in my coat pocket. I told her to take them home and give them to our son-in-law who smokes.
I quit smoking that day, cold turkey. Since then I’ve never had a craving, never wanted one. If you don’t really want to quit there’s no pill, patch, or gum that will make you do it. When you really want to, you will. I can enjoy watching the kids’ baseball, football, and volleyball games. Fishing with my grandson is the happiest time of my life. I still have emphysema and it will never go away. At the time I didn’t really think about the fact I was killing myself or just didn’t care. All I’m trying to do now is squeeze a little extra time before it runs out for me.
MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER CLOWNING AT RJ’s BASEBALL GAME
polination.blog 
Pete: “If you don’t really want to quit there’s no pill, patch, or gum that will make you do it. When you really want to, you will.”
That’s what I’ve always heard.
Willpower is something any normal-minded person can call upon to an astonishing degree, but like most powers it’s easier if you’ve practiced “can” instead of “can’t.”
I may have mentioned before: Mom started smoking when she was 17. She smoked for fifty years. One day while visiting her grandbaby, Mom was short of breath, and thought, here it is, the big C, or something.
Turned out it was really just an allergy-asthma attack, but she laid the cigs down cold turkey then and there. (She had practiced giving up cigs every year for Lent for decades.)
When she lays out the cards for solitaire, she says, she took up this version of sol because she loses readily and has to shuffle more. Keeps her hands busy. Still craving, thirty years later! BUT!! Thirty years later she’s alive to meet MY new grandkid. And visit the gym twice a week.
Meanwhile, let me say I’ve always detested “morality taxes.” Even if they worked as advertised and, instead of smuggling and black markets, people really did quit/reduce their smoking or gambling or drinking sugary drinks or using gasoline, then the gov’t is just out of that “revenue,” and they have to tax something else to make up for it. It’s all unfair, posturing, and in a way enforcing a kind of State Religion.
tl;dr: Mom got clean. Gov’t sux.
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