23 Years of Smoking
July 9, 2008 – 12:37 pmI know it's been a little while since my last post and it may seem odd for me to do a second post in a row about smoking, but last month I marked 1 year since I'd last had a cigarette or any sort of tobacco use, and it got me thinking about all the cigarettes I'd smoked over the 23 or so years since I first picked it up and when I last put it down.
First, I want to tell any of you who believed the tobacco companies when they said it isn't addictive, that it's an addiction just like alcohol or drugs or gambling. You can quit and be clean of the "physical addiction" for as long as you like, but you'll always want to go back. You don't quit smoking and the urge to smoke goes away. The urge remains. It just gets weaker and you stop giving in to it.
My thing is that if I started smoking again, my wife wouldn't say "oh well. I guess you're just a smoker. Thanks for trying." She'd be on my case, demanding to know when I was going to quit again. I've decided the pain of quitting again wouldn't be worth whatever temporary pleasure I'd get from starting up again.
Anyhow, I decided to try to tally up all the tobacco I'd used during that 23 years. Sometimes I smoked less, sometimes more, and gave up for a few months here and there, so I'm going to call it an average of 3/4 of a pack a day for 23 years. That's 23 times 365, plus 5 leap year days for exactly 8400 days times 15 cigarettes a day. That's 126,000 cigarettes or 6300 packs. If we multiplied that by the current pricing of nearly $6 a pack here in Washington, that would be $37,800, enough to buy over 5 and one half tons of SPAM. It's enough to feed 272 people 2,000 calories worth of SPAM per day for a month. So, the cost of 23 years worth of cigarettes is roughly equal to enough SPAM to feed a large village for a month.
Doing some research on the weight of a cigarette, I came up with .68 grams of tobacco per cigarette. Thus the tobacco in 23 years worth of cigarettes would be 188.84 pounds of tobacco. That's around the weight I *should* be (if I ate right and exercised more). I smoked a grown man's weight worth of tobacco.
Can you come up with any more rough equivalents for 23 years of smoking? Post them in the comments below.
If you need help, try my Smoking Calculator at calculators-free.com. You can use it to do the calculations, plus there's free Creative Commons licensed source code if you'd like to put the calculator on your site.
2 Responses to “23 Years of Smoking”
Look, it probably won't be any comfort, but I quit more than 20 years ago, and I don't want it, like it, or think about it any more. In fact, the smell of the smoke is very unpleasant to me now.
So it may be that some day, you won't think about it, either. Good luck.
By Chakolate on Jul 9, 2008
This won't be a lot of comfort either, but what the heck. I quit 11 years ago. I never analyzed it the way you did. I always believed that there is nothing anyone can do about yesterday. All we have is right now and the future. I never looked back and that’s what helped me the most. I hang with a few smokers and I kind of enjoy the scent of burning tobacco. It’s not enough to get me started again, but a whiff once in a while is OK. I don’t want to smoke, though. I couldn’t deal with quitting again. Stick with it, don’t look back and you will be OK.
By Observer on Dec 14, 2008