New Zealand - you gotta be this old to have rights.

[emjay]

Seem pretty fucked up to me.

They got a new law - that if you are born after a certain date - you can NEVER buy tobacco products....

As a tobacco addict, I wish someone had stopped me. The crap about "will" is just that.

I know it has to be the right time for anyone to quit smoking... it has to come from within, when you're ready yourself... ie no-one else can make the decision for you. But for what it's worth, in case you ever do want to quit, I was a die-hard smoker, as you describe yourself, and I never believed in a million years I'd be able to quit smoking - because I have very little willpower and had tried many times before. It took a doctor telling me I needed to, because they found what might have been cancer, to finally make me make that decision.

And how I did it was with a drug called Champix. The stuff is a miracle drug as far as I'm concerned... it only really required one instance of willpower; you take the drug for a few weeks prior to stopping, then make a decision at some point to actually stop... that was the only real instance of willpower needed in my experience. What the drug does is it makes cigarettes both taste and be emotionally bland... so while you're smoking while taking it, you're not getting anything out of it... and at some point you're ready to say 'this is completely pointless' about the cigarette in your hand and therefore make that decision to stop.

After that, I never looked back; just gently worked on covering all my triggers; tried to identify everything that had any potential to trigger me, went out and did it without smoking, and felt incredibly proud. Like I would usually have had several cigarettes on a long bus journey... one before I get on, one when I get off, but it was my challenge to go to a Pride march on several interlinking buses, as well as the march itself, without smokes, and that was a very proud achievement for me. At the end of the course of the drug, I stopped early because I thought I was well and truly now a non-smoker... so I've still got a bit of the stuff left, keeping it at the time with the thought that I might need it if I ever went back to smoking and wanted to quit again... but I seriously have never looked back, so profound is the effect of this stuff.

So, as I said, I know noone can quit smoking till they're ready, so please don't take this post as me being preachy or whatever, but just letting you know this is very solid option for die-hard smokers, which is how you seem to describe yourself and was how I was. So just putting this out there as something you could perhaps bookmark for the future, if you're interested. And if you are interested, all you'd need to do is ask your doctor. And if you can't get that, there's also another, similar drug, called Zyban, which has similar effects but achieves it in different ways... you could research them both to see which one you prefer.