Should we ban the purchase of cigarettes for life? A US town is trying

theguardian.com:

M ary Jo began smoking when she was 12 years old, sneaking behind her church and picking up cigarette butts off the ground. As she got a little older, she would steal cigarettes from her brother and, by 15, she was buying her own packs – a proud Marlboro smoker.

“I smoked for 30 years,” she tells me. “I smoked when I was pregnant.” She was desperate to quit, or at least cut down the number of cigarettes, but nothing worked. “The guiltier I felt, the more I smoked,” she continues. “I would just hide my belly so that people couldn’t see.” Her younger son was born premature at only 5lb. “I cried because he was so tiny.”

Mary Jo is now a 58-year-old housekeeper living in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and back in 2006, she finally quit smoking. It took her four tries. (On average, it takes smokers eight to 14 attempts to permanently quit.)

On her first try, she was crossing the street when an enormous truck came by. Mary Jo remembers thinking, “Go ahead and kill me. I don’t care.” Cigarettes, after all, were what got her out of bed. Without them, the depression was overwhelming, like a soaking wet blanket wringing her body. She’d hallucinate cigarettes flying past, her hand reflexively reaching out to grasp them.

In the end, the stop-smoking pill Chantix and a water bottle were what allowed her to quit. The medication helped with the depression while the water bottle – with a picture of “a good lung and a bad lung on the front and a picture of my boys on the back” – quenched her cravings, a sip for every time she needed a cigarette. She must have drunk three gallons a day.

“It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” Mary Jo says. “I would rather go through childbirth a hundred times over than quit smoking again.”

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