Ending your nicotine addiction

By Jeanne Starmack

If you can’t quit ‘cold turkey,’ there’s help.

Trying to break a nicotine habit for the new year — or at any time — can just break you down.

If you’ve ever tried to quit smoking, you know the feeling. That tightness in your chest. Your nerves, on high alert for a sweet puff of relief while your brain agonizes: “It’s not coming. It’s not coming.”

It’s hard to concentrate at work. It’s hard to even get through the first 10 minutes of being awake. How are you going to have your morning cup of coffee without that cigarette, too?

If someone ever tells you that it’ll be easy to quit smoking, don’t be fooled. It isn’t. It takes a determination, or, as Tom Black likes to call it, a “pigheadedness” not to give in.

Black, 29, who lives in Hermitage, Pa., and works in Harley-Davidson’s parts department in Austintown, hasn’t smoked in 10 months. He quit in sympathy with his wife in February when they learned she was pregnant. He had smoked for 14 years, working his way up to between one and two packs a day.

He put those butts down — he has the date noted on his calendar — Feb. 16, and he didn’t pick them up again. They lay on his dresser for two weeks, along with his lighter. That was, he said, a kind of reminder for him that he was determined to go through with it. Oh, and if he decided he couldn’t do it, it would save him an emergency trip to the store.

He quit without gum, or patches, or group therapy. Yes, it was hard.

“Like anything else, if you’re addicted, it’s constant cravings,” he said. He persisted, he said, through sheer stubbornness. That’s not a small accomplishment.

Your body takes about five days to rid itself of the physical craving for nicotine, said Pam Nock, a certified tobacco treatment specialist who is also clinical director for Humility of Mary Health Partners Regional Tobacco Treatment Center.

The psychological addiction, Nock said, is forever, though the cravings lessen over time. Years later even, something could trigger a craving in an ex-smoker.

Nock, whose background is in addiction treatment, said nicotine is a harder habit to break than cocaine or heroin. For smokers who really want to quit but aren’t sure they’ll be as stoic as Black when it comes to resisting temptation, the tobacco treatment center offers help.

All you have to do its pick up the phone and make an appointment for an assessment, said Nock.

Then, you’ll be assigned to a treatment group for weekly sessions that continue for five weeks. After that come four weeks of follow-up care, she said, and there’s even Nicotine Anonymous, a 12-step group for people who need help later.

Treatment groups meet in the mornings, afternoons and evenings to accommodate everyone’s schedule, she said. They meet at St. Elizabeth Health Center on Belmont Avenue in Youngstown, at the old St. Joseph Hospital building on Tod Avenue in Warren, and at OCCHA (Tuesday mornings only) on Shirley Road in Youngstown for classes in Spanish.

Best of all, the program is funded by the Ohio Department of Health and the American Legacy Foundation of Washington, D.C. It’s free for participants, even paying for over-the-counter nicotine gum or patches. There’s stronger medication available by prescription. Get your doctor to write you one, and the program picks up that cost as well, Nock said.

Pennsylvania residents are eligible, too.

“We’re based on a federal study, updated in 2008, that shows if you combine medication with counseling, people quit and stay quit,” Nock said. “I talk about, ‘one day at a time, one craving at a time.’”

The groups learn how to cope with stress and cravings during those first, rough weeks, she said, and they see the health benefits right away. The program monitors their bodies’ carbon monoxide levels, she said, to show them how dramatically those levels fall after just two days.

Participants will notice they have a better sense of taste, they’re breathing better and sleeping better, she said.

People learn plenty of tricks too, such as what not to eat and what to do to keep their hands occupied, she said.

Especially watch the alcohol, which is the main reason people relapse, she said.

Black, who enjoys a beer on the weekends, concurs.

“I tested my mettle,” he said. “I said, ‘I can’t be good for four days then go to a bar on the weekend and smoke, and yeah, I’d have a beer and it drove me crazy.”

For Black, though, quitting was just the sensible thing to do. He had to smoke outside the house anyway, to spare his 7-year-old stepdaughter second-hand haze.

There was also the financial incentive.

“I needed to cut some costs, and thought, ‘what better way than to do something better for you,’” he said.

Yes, he still gets cravings. But he takes it a step at a time, getting through “one more day.”