Quit Smoking or Die!

By Richard Renstone

Renstone penned Quit Smoking or Die! to save lives and prevent deaths and diseases caused by cigarette smoking. Renstone is well aware of the effects of cigarette smoking because he WAS a two-pack-a-day smoker, which is fifty cigarettes a day. In other words, whenever you saw him, he had a cigarette in hand or one burning in an ashtray somewhere very close.

 

This book is written for people who are thinking about quitting, ready to quit, have tried to quit multiple times, and have failed or have given up altogether. You are not alone. Even with the author's substantial daily consumption of cigarettes, he still managed to stop, and he is sure anyone can.

 

Quit Smoking or Die! is a little book that offers a compelling success story about how a real diehard smoker successfully quit smoking after struggling with it for over 25 years. During that period, Renstone attempted to stop smoking over twelve times without success, always returning to excuses and smoking. However, Renstone knew deep down that all it takes is one successful attempt to end smoking, and he did it.

 

This book provides a proven plan to help you quit smoking forever without losing your mind. You will never look back, continue living as a healthy non-smoker and be very proud of defeating this addiction.

 

                                                                              Most importantly, you will SAVE YOUR LIFE and others!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Renstone
• Release date: May 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780997959659

Richard Renstone

Richard Renstone has been in the workforce for 40 years, with over twenty years of that time being spent as a permanent employee and more than 15 years as a contractor / consultant. The author has held many positions while working in many sectors such as, food industry, office machinery, industrial, energy, mining, publishing, manufacturing, IT, technical services, education, medical devices, industrial electronics, engineering and construction. Richard Renstone has worked for many industry leaders and during that time was very fortunate to work in many parts of the world including, Canada, USA, Columbia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Indonesia, Venezuela, Portugal, Australia, and Italy.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Welcome and thank you for purchasing "Quit Smoking or Die!" which tells me that you are ready to take affirmative action regarding your health and to save your life! I am so delighted that you are in the right headspace to be reading this book because it tells me that you are already questioning your smoking or vaping, looking for a way out, and ready to take on the challenge of stopping your habit.

First, anyone writing a book or giving advice about quitting or stopping smoking that wasn’t a diehard smoker will never understand the true nature of what you and other smokers are going through. They will never comprehend why you just can’t quit and stop smoking. Only smokers can genuinely understand other smokers/vapors and their hardcore smoking habits.

To put it another way, a person who has never experienced smoking that tries to provide advice about the topic lacks real experience and insight. So how in the world can this person be a subject matter expert? They can't. This is no different from someone trying to tell you about pregnancy that has never been pregnant or someone who is telling you about coffee that doesn’t even drink coffee. Get the picture; it’s all based on opinion, theory, or pure conjecture with no insight, practicality, or real-life experience rendering most of the information useless.

Smoking conventional cigarettes are considered to be old school, even though millions still smoke them. Today, vaping is the new smoking, but I feel cigarettes and vaping are synonymous, providing users with very similar health benefits. I was a conventional cigarette smoker.

I was a two-pack-a-day smoker, which is fifty cigarettes a day. In other words, whenever you saw me, I had a cigarette in hand or one burning in an ashtray somewhere very close. Even with this substantial daily consumption of cigarettes, I still managed to stop, and I am sure you can too.

Quit Smoking or Die! is a little book that offers a success story about how I finally quit smoking after struggling with it for over 25 years. During that period, I attempted to stop over twelve times without success, always returning to excuses and smoking.  

One of my problems was that I liked smoking cigarettes, which contributed substantially by making it even more difficult for me to stop. Quitting smoking was like a repetitive stop/start cycle. I would stop smoking and then start again. It was always on some whim, like going for a few drinks with friends, meeting someone for coffee, or going to a party which all triggered the urge to smoke another cigarette.

I would always use many excuses to give myself the okay to light up at a bar or party or to tell myself that I’ll only smoke for that night. Any of the people there that saw me light up didn’t say much because most were smokers and still wanted me as a group member. Of course, all of this is history. I am approaching my late-fifties but have been a non-smoker for about 15 years.

I was thrilled that I found the inner strength, understanding, patience, power, ability, and mindset to quit successfully, which is why I decided to write this little book. If I could successfully stop smoking after being a 50-cigarette-a-day smoker, who liked smoking, it means you can quit too. One thing to keep in mind is don’t EVER think it’s TOO LATE TO STOP, regardless if you are 12 or 90 years old. It’s never too late, and it's always doable! You will find out how to do it in the next chapters.

CHAPTER 1 - A LITTLE TOBACCO HISTORY

First of all, smoking tobacco is nothing new and has been around for more than a few millenniums. Smoking tobacco and other drugs have been around the Americas since 5000 BC. At the same time, Europe introduced smoking in the mid-fifteen hundreds using a pipe. However, in North America, indigenous groups would smoke tobacco in their pipes for social, religious, or medical reasons. Once European settlers came to North America in the early 15th century, indigenous groups started using smoking tobacco as an act of friendliness, celebration, negotiation, or to seal peace treaties. This is how the label peace pipe was derived. Evidently, this suggested that smoking tobacco was occasional and accepted.

Believe it or not, a smoking tobacco opposition movement started in the late 1500s. The people responsible for this opposition movement were various religious groups, doctors, and even King James I. The ideology driving this opposition was that smoking tobacco harms your health. This was at a time when medical knowledge and technologies were relatively primitive as compared to today. Another opposing idea was that growing tobacco plants was also considered a waste of using fertile soil. Instead, land should be used for growing useful crops such as wheat, barley, corn, oats, and other items such as vegetables.

Smoking in the USA was primarily among men who smoked. By the 1920s, both men and women were smokers bringing smoking cigarettes to a peak in the early sixties only shortly after to start declining. If you watch noir movies or even the color chromatic ones from the 60s, you’ll see that everyone was smoking everywhere. As a young child in the early sixties, I remember our family doctor even smoked. Yes, doctors smoked too. Smoking continued to be accepted until the mid-1990s by many. Or I should say it was tolerated by practically everyone, including spouses, children, relatives, friends, co-workers, and others that didn’t smoke.

All kinds of methods were used by tobacco companies to convince the public to accept cigarettes and to start smoking. The media delivered the campaigns from the fifties to the late seventies. The media, like posters, billboards, radio, and television, were the primary sources of luring people into becoming smokers. Even though TV was only in its infancy, it was very effective in capturing new smokers by promoting smoking as the in thing to do. Using movies, television shows, and especially television commercials to market and sell tobacco to the masses, convincing them that smoking was pleasurable, stylish, and sexy.

Smoking was promoted on and off-screen by Hollywood stars around the world. These TV programs and movies would show actors smoking everywhere, in the office, home, department stores, and any other place imaginable. In these commercials, the stars always offered their friends or co-workers cigarettes, which became the norm for millions. Tobacco companies prospered like hell during this time by convincing millions worldwide to smoke.

Many people would watch their favorite films and actors and think that if the actors and their doctors smoke, why shouldn’t they smoke cigarettes. Smoking was the new craze, the sign of the times. It was as if everyone was doing it, parents, siblings, friends, teachers, lawyers, doctors, specialists, heart surgeons, preachers, nurses, and so on.

Based on these few facts, the notion of how widely acceptable smoking cigarettes was and how trendy it made it seem like almost everyone was going to start smoking. This trend continued for a while until pundits in North America and parts of Europe realized the awful truth about smoking cigarettes and the devastating health implications that would ensue.

This movement was the start of a growing group of anti-smokers that opposed cigarettes and commenced exposing what smoking was doing to people’s health. This anti-tobacco group continued a vast movement to educate people about the harmful health consequences of the long-term use of cigarettes and the effects of second-hand smoke.

Yes, smokers for decades had smoking freedom, in colleges, universities, classrooms, buses, trains, bars, casinos, airplanes, workplaces, basically in every public place imaginable. Smoking was so widespread and acceptable that I even began smoking at an early age.

CHAPTER 2 - HOW I STARTED SMOKING 

I started smoking in the early seventies with my friends when I was only in Grade five(5). At the age of eleven, we didn’t realize what we were getting ourselves into but thought; we were so cool and badass. At the time, smoking was a new craze to many young people and widely accepted by almost everyone, including medical doctors, teachers, executives, nurses, and many more. There were advertisements on TV, radio, billboards, and every other form of media exposure possible. The most effective campaigns were actors smoking in almost every movie or TV show. The most significant influence, of course, was close to me, such as friends, their parents, siblings, and my three older siblings, who all smoked.

All this cigarette exposure played right into our naive mindset as children, and our monkey sees, monkey do actions. Yes, this mimicry we performed made us feel different from other kids by feeling mature, cool, and joining all the others doing it. Shit ya, we were the cool rebels, not a part of the jock, brain, geek, or creative crowds.  

I remember when we first started smoking. It was Robert, Phillip, Mark, and I that lit up our first cigarettes. Robert had stolen some menthol cigarettes from his mother. Of course, we didn’t care much about the brand, length, flavor, strength, or anything else; we were too excited to start smoking.

We took the cigarettes and went to our usual secluded hang-out area. It was a place we could be somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. About five (5) acres of bush covered a composite network of narrow dirt walking trails. The forest was so dense you couldn’t see vehicles on the surrounding streets, nor could anyone see inside the area.

We would always hang-out in a central location that was a small, cleared circular area with five large multi-sized boulders set within the clearing. We used the rocks for seating. It was one of the places where we would hang out, play games, and do forbidden and sometimes illegal stuff, which was our defiant side. In other words, if our parents found out what we were doing, there would be hell to pay.

I can recall smoking cigarettes in this wooded area but also having wooden match fights. Before fighting with matches, we would walk around the trails gathering scrap wood, branches, and other bits. Then we would use the materials to build these shabby and unstable structures we called forts. Each team would sit in their fortresses, firing lit wooden matches at each other.

We would make up two teams, with two people, sometimes three. Before starting the game, each team would prepare their ammunition. Our ammunition consisted of wooden matches.  We used match guns made from old wooden clothespins with a repositioned spring. The modified clothespin (Match Gun Video YouTube) match guns were easy to load and fire. They would shoot wooden matches about six feet or more with mediocre accuracy that were perfect for the job.

Other ammunition entailed a wooden match concoction we called canons. Canons were comprised of two wooden matches placed head to head and tightly wrapped by a thin sheet of chewing gum foil. The foil was then tightly wrapped around the matches to ensure combustion compression. We would secure one end of the canon while pointing the other end at the opposing fort, then light a match and heat the center. The two-match heads would ignite, launching the loose end many feet and, at times, passing the fort and sailing into the bush.

Match gunfights