If there was a five-minute nuclear warning, I’d run straight to my local shop and buy a pack of cigarettes. Even now, after all these years. I stopped more than a decade ago – note that I say “stopped” rather than “gave up” because the latter implies a sacrifice, and I have been brainwashed (OK, hypnotised) not to use the term. But you are never really a non-smoker. You are just a smoker who is currently not smoking. In your soul, you are forever one of the people who leave the table after eating to go and have a conversation outside, even if you physically stay put these days.
So, as someone who found it difficult to quit, it’s baffling to hear that although two stop-smoking medications have been available in the UK since 2024, only 0.2% of those attempting to give up have used them, according to an analysis of NHS data on smoking in England. Cytisine (which also goes by cytisinicline) is a plant-based product that has been used in eastern Europe since the 70s and may appeal to those who prefer a natural option over a synthetic drug. It mimics the effects of nicotine, and tricks your brain into thinking you’ve had a cigarette. Varenicline – withdrawn in 2021 over concerns about impurities, but now reformulated and rereleased – can apparently reduce the urge to smoke, make you enjoy it less when you do and ease withdrawal symptoms.
I tried everything when it came to my struggle with Silk Cut. Patches, gum, lozenges – I carried on smoking while I wore, chewed and sucked them all. I read the world-famous success story The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr (no, not that one). I attended the NHS in-person sessions, three times, to no effect. I was a triple failure, and oddly proud of it for a reason I still don’t quite understand.
I had neurolinguistic programming, where the man shook my hand as he greeted me, asking, “And how long was it that you smoked for?”
“Oh, I still smoke now. I just had one outside,” I volunteered cheerfully.
He tutted and told me that for some clients, talking about smoking in the past tense like that was all it took. I scoffed at those weaklings as I walked to my train afterwards – in a cloud of smoke, obviously.
The closest I came to victory back then was a hypnotist recommended by a friend, with the caveat that he sounded so much like Cliff Richard it was hard to take him seriously. She didn’t mention that he worked out of an extremely insalubrious portable cabin at the back of a building site. As I knocked on the tin-can door (while simultaneously putting out yet another last ever cigarette), I reasoned that if he murdered me, I would technically have given up smoking, therefore this would have been a success.
Reader, he did not murder me. In gentle, dulcet tones, he told me I felt sleepy, while I felt embarrassed for him because I definitely wasn’t hypnotised. When he “brought me round” he asked me how long I thought I’d “been under”. I’d been thinking about what to have for dinner the whole time, so stifled a giggle as I told him: about 10 minutes. He replied that it had been two hours.
The next morning, it occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought about smoking, let alone done it. Thrilled, I sent another friend, who had the same experience. However, a year later, almost to the day, we both started smoking again. I went back for a do-over but it didn’t work.
In the end, I probably spent about as much on trying to stop smoking as I had on cigarettes, and the thing that finally worked was free: boring old willpower. It was agony. Personally, I would have bitten the doctor’s hand off if they could have given me a treatment that worked. And while of course no treatment is 100% effective, as I found out, stopping smoking is hard and gruelling. The more options people have, and the more visible and accessible these options are, the better.