butts

Five weeks ago, I came down with a brief cold. I retreated to my bed; after Robitussin, a Law & Order marathon, and lots of rest, I was fine. But I hadn't had a cigarette in days.

Since then, I've smoked about 40 cigarettes. About 30 of those where while drinking, in the company of other smokers. I'm so! close! to quitting for real. The quit hurdles come in threes, we arbitrarily believe without much evidence. That's fine; 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks, and 3 months from now, I don't think I'll care. Where did that notion arise, anyway? I haven't been able to figure out. Maybe some brochure in some clinic somewhere, and it just spread....

In Dundee, a region in Scotland where half of smokers are impoverished, the NHS recently announced they will offer quit incentives[PDF] - about $25 a week which is provided in a pre-paid card. Participants must pass a test which looks for evidence of smoking.  The card cannot be used for alcohol or tobacco. (The NHS must know, a strong drink makes me both crave a butt and become susceptible to that craving.) The smokers also receive counseling and nicotine patches. The program is based on "Give It Up for Baby", a similar system targeting pregnant smokers. via BBC

Would you give up smoking if you got paid? Is $25 a week enough to get you thinking about it? If you don't smoke, but could really use $25, do you think this is a little unfair?

I think the notion of being drug tested for smoking is interesting, a little odd to contemplate - it puts cigarette addiction in the same realm as 'harder' drugs like opiates. And I wonder, would smoking tests end up in CVS, next to the pot and opiate tests? Don't bother with the breath mints and Febreze, Mom is going to test me when I get home anyway.

(This tests for the 5 most commonly abused prescription drugs as well as Ecstacy. It's About Prevention.)

A Philadelphia study of the effects of incentives on quitting seemed to show that incentives work, but only for the short-term... relapse rates were about the same whether the participants received money or not. Maybe the problem with paying folks to quit is that once they quit, the reinforcement disappears. I know that once I recovered from my cold and was well enough, I wanted to go right back to smoking, even though I had passed the 3 hours, 3 days mark.

I'll remind myself about the evils of Big Tobacco, though, and find my own incentives there... until I have a cocktail, at least.