Sloth please … 
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You have to look at it this way! When you know you are suffering health problems you realize that it may be a choice between smoking or breathing & that changes how you think.
I gave up for 12 years, but started again as I spent time with somebody that smoked. A few years later I was diagnosed with cancer and from the moment they told me I have never had another cigarette…and honestly never wanted one again!
I have never been convinced that an addiction to nicotine made me smoke, I think it was just a habit that was hard to stop!
I gave up 15 years ago, and was so surprised how easy it was. I soon realised that the hardest part was making the decision to do it. Once that resolution was firmly in my head it was all downhill.
Not sure about that Baz - I started smoking when I was about 15 and at that age you feel invincible. You know - “it’s not going to happen to me”. Just like getting old, that wasn’t going to happen to me either 
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When I was around 13-14 or so we had a visit at school from the local police (why the police, I’ll never know!) to give us a talk about the dangers of smoking. They brought with them two sealed specimen jars - one with a third of a healthy lung, the other with a whole lung, both preserved in formaldehyde. They were the same size. I remember being utterly shocked that this was what smoking could do to my lungs. A year or so later I was smoking 
. Oh, I wasn’t going to carry on smoking, oh no! I was just going to try it for a while, and if I could feel myself getting addicted I would stop . It took over 40 years for that to happen.
Well done @Danny and @Dextrous for quitting - it’s a great feeling isn’t it! 
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I had a similar experience, but it was about the danger of drug taking, after the talk I couldn’t wait to start experimenting.
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It’s all because we can only learn from our own experience, not others’.
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No I misunderstood .I see they will never be able to smoke that it’s a good ruling but how will they enforce it ?
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I have never smoked or taken or even been offered drugs .
I find smoking disgusting and drug taking inexplicable.
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Ah but Muddy maybe you didn’t have that talk by a policeman, he had slides of “drug takers”, gorgeous long haired guys in afghan coats and girls with flowers painted on their faces and I thought they look like they’re having fun.
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I just missed that era I would have liked to have been a hippy .
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When I was 15 it would have been 1960, the danger to health was not known and it was a case of ‘doing the adult thing’ plus of course, peer pressure.
Cutting right back on sugar, after a Type 2 diabetes scare, that seemed very much like giving up smoking was. The craving for sugar or any craving is in the mind, that tells the body what is needed so that is what you do. When I was informed that sugar is eight times as addictive as cocaine that hardly seemed possible. It definitely is addictive though in that it’s a ‘pleasure drug’ recognised as that by the mind’s pleasure receptors. Like smoking it’s not easy to give up sugar but like smoking the benefits are certainly well worth it if you can achieve that.
Yeah, well, there is that. 
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What a misogynist idea! It could never be implemented here in feminist Sweden where the only noticeable smokers are females. 
I’m with you. I took a few non-inhaling puffs of tobacco when I was young and I was even offered (pressured actually) to “shoot up” heroin but I resisted. I did suck on a few splifs however but I couldn’t see any reason to carry on with it. When my best friend and I went through our respective divorces during the same period we did get inebriated every night for a week but then I dropped out and left him to it. I have nothing more to add. 
It’s was known Baz the dangers of smoking had been known since the 1940-50s propaganda from the tobacco industry opposed these findings
Both my parents were non smokers ,no one in my immediate family smoked and I was never pressured by my peers .
I can remember lectures in schools in the sixties complete with pictures of black lungs etc .
Maybe it was the fact I didn’t know about the dangers, it definitely wasn’t publicised as it is nowadays. My father smoked but didn’t drink alcohol, smoking wasn’t discouraged by him in the way alcohol was. As I mentioned I smoked but have almost always been teetotal. Maybe if my father had not smoked then neither would I have done so.
During my teens I observed that both my parents were having considerable difficulty in giving up smoking. It seemed obvious to me not to start. I have never regretted that decision.
I smoked 10 a day for 25 years, I enjoyed it, therefore don’t regret it.
Smoking, firearms, violent films, and pornography ought all to be banned. I am guilty of “using” one of them and I’d be better off if it were banned and done with.
Mr M the most gentle of men likes watching horrible films on netflick .
Some were vaguely ok like Game of thrones and Outlander .
But he has progressed to worse ones
Ie the walking dead and The punisher .So yesterday I was pleased to see he was watching some interesting stuff re the Knights Templar
But alas in two ticks it changed into violence and worse I see it has umpteen episodes
Knightfell 
So I made him sit through the puissance event of the International Horse Show .
Further strictures maybe in order -Dressage today 
Very few of my friends didn’t smoke when I was young.Now none of them do.
The live ones anyway.