You said this was the year you were going to do it.

Kept telling yourself that for months.

Even spent the last few weeks of 2023 giving yourself pep talks.

You got rid of any temptations. Warned friends and family you might be on edge. Stacked up on gum.

You were going to quit smoking. And you did. Way to go!

But less than three weeks later you are back buying and puffing and filling your lungs with a poison that you know causes heart disease, stroke, lung diseases like chronic bronchitis and emphysema, as well as osteoporosis and cataracts. But you know all that. You do.

So why not give it another try.

Don’t quit quitting.

I’m begging you. 

So are family and friends who care about you.

I know it’s not easy. No, I really don’t.

I’ve never smoked. Pretty amazing given that I grew up in a household where both my parents smoked. A lot. I don’t ever remember a time when they weren’t smoking. 

My Dad worked in smoke-filled nightclubs and smoked on stage, mic in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He smoked Kools. Mom always had a Raleigh dangling while she played mahjong, drank coffee or talked on the phone. I never asked but I wonder if she stopped while she was pregnant. Not that it would have made much of a difference. I’m shocked the secondhand smoke didn’t get to me. On car rides they both puffed away, turning the backseat into a Turkish prison.

Dad never gave up and died after a severe stroke.

My mom quit for about a decade, but the nicotine had already damaged her lungs. She also died after a stroke.

I never did the math to figure out how many cigarettes they each must have smoked in their lives. There are 20 cigarettes in a pack. They easily smoked close to two packs a day. And they were always buying cartons, which have 10 packs of cigarettes. Over 40 years, that’s more than 400,000 cigarettes. I’m being conservative.

Like you, they knew what they were doing. They knew the risks. Maybe not when they started as teens in the ‘50s. But they sure knew as adults.

That’s what bothers me about folks who smoke these. Especially teens.

For decades they’ve been warned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by their doctors, heck, it even says so on the packs of the cigarettes they buy: Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States. 

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure, reports the CDC. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.

On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers.

If smoking continues at the current rate among U.S. youth, 5.6 million of today’s Americans younger than 18 years of age are expected to die prematurely from a smoking-related illness. This represents about one in every 13 Americans aged 17 years or younger who are alive today.

According to The American Lung Association, the average daily smoker smokes 15 cigarettes a day. In New York, that smoker spends about $10 per day, or $3,650 every year. Smoke more than a pack and you’re looking at $7,000-$8,000 a year to kill yourself.

When Mom died, my brother and I cleaned out her apartment. Neatly tucked away was a shoe box filled with hundreds and hundreds of Raleigh cigarette stamps. They were the added bonus from the tobacco companies. Redeemable stamps and cancer. What a deal.

The idea is you would trade in the stamps for something of value from the tobacco company catalogue. If only they offered you a new lung.

I don’t think she ever bought anything with the stamps.

It was a brutal reminder of just how much she smoked. I kept the box to show my kids. In time, my grandkids.

It kills me that my parents didn’t stop after all the warnings they knew as adults. Kills me.

Don’t let it kill you. Try again. Don’t quit on quitting.

Barry Lewis is a longtime journalist and author who lives with his wife Bonnie in the Town of Neversink. He can be reached at      barrylewisscdemocrat@gmail.com.