In criticism of…presidential smoking
Jesus christ, last thursday’s guardian editorial was a bit fucked up. first of all, they start off with the common fallacy that NRTs are actually helpful:
“we applaud President Lula of Brazil who has given up smoking – 50 years after he started. Apparently it was sheer force of will that did it: no nicotine patches, no gum, no tablets.”
people who use NRTs to quit succeed in spite of them, not because of them. so why are NRTs recommended? this is based on the misconseption that smoking is a habit, and so once the “habit” of sucking on burning leaves is broken, then nicotine withdrawal will be made easier. this is bullshit. smoking is drug addiction. i have tried to quit before using NRTs, and failed. the product (patches) recommended using them for a total of 8 weeks. that is 8 weeks of withdrawal versus the 2 weeks of cold turkey. when i was using them (patches, for a few days) i still had cravings. it felt like a handjob without ever cumming. why would i put myself through that for 8 weeks? fuck dat. with cold turkey, 3 nasty days, then 2 okish weeks and you’re pretty much done.
secondly:
“Given that history [of Lyndon Johnson], perhaps it’s better for Obama to have the odd puff if the alternative is keeping all that stress bottled up inside.”
firstly, smoking doesn’t relieve the stress of being president. it relieve’s the stress of a nicotine addict not having their nicotine. without cigarettes, obama would be much more healthy, physically and mentally. secondly, Lyndon Johnson obviously kept holding onto the thought that he was always going to go back to smoking after being president. his physical dependency was long gone (provided he didn’t sneak off for a fag occaisionally), but mentally his conscious mind had not truly given up cigarettes. you need to move on:
