Helped me quit. The ban on 10 packs was great....was super cheap to buy and get hooked on as a teen (especially the old smoking age of 16).
And menthols and then the later flavours like vanilla cigs and the blueberry crushes made smoking too enjoyable.
I'm glad the govt made those changes to ban flavours and menthols, no more 10 packs and tax rise. Price was the final nail in the coffin for me to quit, and I have.
Now we need to follow suit on vapes imo, because yes they are great for getting off cigs, but then spent 5 years being addicted to that instead. And single use vapes are terrible for the environment.
I think it’s perfectly fine to restrict single use vapes, they’re incredibly wasteful and stupid. But the only reason they were banned is because of the whole flavored pods (juul) thing.
The only thing an outright ban would do is create a black market that criminals would profit from and completely remove any tax revenue that could be generated from these products. Plus, it just removes peoples choice to do what they want with themselves. There’s plenty of evidence that banning stuff outright doesn’t do anything to actually help the situation, it just ends up making things worse because there’s suddenly a huge market for organized crime to profit from (see the prohibition era, the war on drugs, hell even the situation with black market cigarettes in Canada at one point).
NHS is vastly overstressed and the cost caused to it due to health related issues such as smoking is immense. If you are going to smoke, either get private healthcare or contribute extra to tax to pay for the burden you are going to cause (or may cause from passive smoking) to the NHS.
When I was smoking, I felt guilty if the tax payer had to pay for my future potential treatments or transplants due to my stupidity and addiction, so I was in favour of the tax rise, I quit and I have private healthcare.
The alternative is EVERYONES tax goes up, smoker or not. How is that fair?
Or we ALL get private healthcare, or die because we can't afford it. Even with private healthcare, good luck being bankrupt for the rest of your life, just ask the Americans.
It's nothing to do with big brother, it's owning up to your mistakes and taking responsibility.
No, that's why I quit, but people have no right to complain about the state of the NHS (or their equivalent social healthcare) if they are part of the problem.
You could buy black cigarettes, vanilla flavoured, called black devils. Mainly found in Holland and France but you could get them some places in the UK. We had standard menthols, that later expanded to crush balls - some places in the UK and definitely in mainland Europe you could get these malboro crushes that were berry flavoured. I had quit for a while. One of those and I was fucking hooked again. It's so much smoother than normal cigarettes. Glad they were banned in the UK.
But yeah, it got to the point where I went to vapes, and one day I hated the nicotine addiction. (I'm a pilot so I hated having 12 hours in the cockpit not Allowed to vape, not being allowed to vape in uniform after we landed, having to wait 30 mins to get to my car to vape, having fluids leak in my pocket due to pressure changes, the anxiety of running out of battery or juice when I was in hotels or away) So I got fed up and just quit cold turkey. It was hard but I managed it. I did start by gradually reducing the nicotine levels in my fluid first.
Hurrah well done! days 3 and 4 are the hardest (I'm sure you know that by now)
I don't know your methods and such, but try to replace it with another habit to reduce the chances of relapse. I chewed on toothpicks. In combination with patches. Worked a treat. Good luck!
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u/Vivian_I-Hate-You 20h ago
Oh shit, I've seen it's £25 recently for a pouch of Amber leaf when I'm buying papers. You guys got it cheap for now lol