I Quit Quitting

Of course I've quit several times. There are many ways to give up this vice, cold-turkey being the most popular and least effective. The facts about nicotine addiction and the toxic effects of smoking whilst well known and widely publicised have over the years made little if any difference to my personal smoking addiction. Prior to government health warnings it was already established beyond all doubt that smoking was linked with bronchitis, emphysema, heart-disease and lung cancer. Despite their prodigious efforts to prove otherwise the tobacco industry's risible attempts to dissuade the public of their culpability owed more to resisting multi-billion dollar class-actions than any real belief in the beneficial effects of filling one's lungs with toxic waste.
Fashionable as it may have proven smoking is one of the most ridiculously dangerous things one can inflict upon one's organism but resisting it is hard and stopping once addicted, seemingly impossible. Indeed the industry intended to support the addicts' remission has grown exponentially and I have certainly explored quite a few of the variants that made Allen Carr a millionaire but which failed to save him from a premature and unpleasant demise.
I recall vividly my encounter with the backstreet hypnotherapist, a man in his late 60's whose preferred company was a small whippet dog which wore a tartan body warmer and lay snuffling at his feet whilst he intoned his mantra intended to stop my cigarette smoking. The cure, though undoubtedly a partial success was predicated on the backsliders charter that other tobacco products were not forbidden and so my cigar and pipe-smoking days began until logic dictated that I was in fact doing more harm to both my lungs and bank balance. I quit quitting soon after this realisation.
My aunt's suggestion that "They should put fags up to ten bob a packet. That'll stop you!" came and passed without demur on my part. I continued to explore the cornucopia of cigarettes and tobacco unashamed of my addiction. My father, who had furnished almost the entire house with Embassy coupons (and would no doubt have smoked his way through the contents of an edge-of-town warehouse full had the scheme not ended), continued to inspire the possibility of immortality as his consumption remained untouched by acute angina and the doctor's predictions of imminent heart failure.
My body, house and car reeked from the stench of stale smoke and ash but a stressful worklife seemed to demand my devotion to smoking continue. I moved from Benson & Hedges to Peter Stuyvesant via Rothmans of Pall Mall, alighting eventually upon Marlborough country where even the death of the Marlborough Cowboy through lung cancer and the appointment of the grim-reaper like figurine of Margaret Thatcher as Phillip Morris' Vice-President of Marketing for China left no impression whatsoever on either my health or conscience. My race toward destiny was not to be so easily arrested.