Is Quitting Smoking Your Number One Priority?

I've been watching plenty of TV since moving back-in with my folks. Cable / sattelite TV is something that would be very low on my list of things to spend money on, but since a cross-section of the cable multiverse is piped-in anyway, why not flip it on while I'm Facebooking, right? As my favorite news networks are droning in the background, I'm exposed to equal parts commercial advertising and actual content.

One advert that causes me to knit my brow, is for a "medicine" to aid in quitting smoking. Given the list of common side effects associated with this drug, it strikes me as more of a serious toxin - one to be avoided at all costs! Given its success rate, you're probably as likely to successfully quit smoking using this drug as you would be if you stirred vaginal cream into your morning coffee... that is if your internal organs aren't turned to pulp first! 

LISTED COMMON SIDE EFFECTS OF SMOKING CESSATION PILLS

constipation

diarrhea

difficulty concentrating

dizziness

flatulence 

headache

heartburn

nausea

sleep disturbance 

unusual tiredness or weakness

vomiting

The actor in the ad, a fellow who looks to be around 60 years old, claims to be a former policeman who's "helped a lot of people" over his career, but during that time, wane to admit that he himself was in dire need of help...  

So let me get this right. If you're a smoker aged sixty, you probably took up the habit in your late teens - and like many smokers, sporadically quit for short periods of time throughout your history of smoking. 

Let's say you averaged about 15 cigarettes per day throughout your 45 years of being a smoking smoker. That's almost 250,000 extinguished stubs of willingly smoked cigarettes! All that terrible smoking, yet here you stand, alive, and well enough to walk around telling me about how you made a decision to begin a trial with a drug, who's disclaimer stops just shy of claiming it could potentially kill you in just a few dozen doses? Baah. 

I think most heavy smokers and leading experts on the subject would easily agree that becoming addicted to tobacco is a very unwise, expensive, and unhealthy thing to do - but once  measured against these space-age cessation drugs, a cigarette almost starts to look like a rather safe, mostly organic medicine for stress relief - a relatively harmless relaxation aid if you will.

One great thing about using tobacco, is that it takes longer to smoke a cigarette than to swallow a pill. Sure it's a weakness, but cravings can serve as a perfectly honest  excuse to completely remove oneself from irritating situations for five or ten minutes. A thinking person's time-out... the ultimate stress relief! 

Would it bother you much to be in the company of someone happily puffing on a cigar with just a nagging cough? Or would you prefer sitting across from an irritable codger, disoriented and confused, half-shitting themselves, and ready to puke on you at any moment as they struggle to describe the sequence of events from their latest in a series of terrifying nightmares?   

In other words, the more immediate side effects of smoking tobacco include: dry cough, cravings.

Smoking tobacco is NOT known to lead to:

changes in behaviour, changes in mood, hallucinations, 

thinking about harming self or others 

poor concentration, 

changes in weight (arguable), 

changes in sleep, 

decreased interest in activities

thoughts of suicide

Yikes! Got a light? I think I'd rather take my chances with possibly developing lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease thirty years down the road!