Smoking in the House

chops018 wrote: »

OP here.

Excuse me to the people calling me rude and entitled.

Well, I never knew one could be entitled about things like their health and their parents, and then things about smell, and smoke in general being disgusting.

It's not like I'm asking them to stop a habit like picking their nose.

Smoking affects the people around you and in my opinion it should be illegal to smoke in any enclosed space or indoors at all. Actually I think smoking should be illegal full stop as it's not like some drugs that people may choose to put in their bodies and they won't affect the person around them, immediately anyway, but smoking does in many ways as mentioned above.

They are being entitled by saying "tough, get out if you don't like it". They won't have an adult conversation with someone else living in the house with them about something I'm concerned over.

If I was a woman and started the OP by saying I'm pregnant and living at home then there would be uproar over my parents smoking. This is no different. Typical Irish approach to say I am being entitled etc.

Maybe I should start flooding the place with candles, or take up an activity of my own that annoys them.

How much more entitled can you be than to 1. expect to live with your parents now you are an adult and 2. expect them to adjust their lifestyle to accommodate your preferences.

I totally agree with all you say about smoking, I have a husband with end-stage COPD and he smoked all his life with no great concern for anyone else.

You have got to this stage, presumably living with them as smokers through your childhood. You were under no illusions when you moved back(?) or chose not to move out when you could afford it. You have told them (calmly and politely!) that their house stinks and you are embarrassed to bring friends in. Well don't bring friends in. Do you ask if they mind their house being invaded by your friends?

You chose to stay on because you want to improve your employment prospects. You are not complaining about smoking because you are afraid for their health, but because you do not like it. You don't like it, move out. Go back to your better paid job and save till you can afford to improve your education at your own expense rather than theirs. Even if you are concerned for their health, they are adults, they can do as they choose. So can you, you can choose to move out.

Vaping is the answer for such inveterate smokers.

You can make all the arguments about no more secondary smoking, the lack of smell, no more yellow walls, ceilings and curtains. No more coughing your lungs up, more energy, risk factors for smoking related diseases dropping back off near to those of a non smoker after a few short years blah blah blah.

The most persuasive argument to my mind for an inveterate smoker? Financial.

If the each 'only' smoke 20 a day, they will save €140 a week, €610 a month or €7300 a year. If they both smoke 30 a day you're at €210 €912 & €10950

They don't 'Do' anything else? They likely cant afford to 'Do' anything else. With that kind of money saved they could be going on cruises every year or buy a brand new Merc or take up all the hobbies they always wanted but never had the money for etc etc

They need to imagine two things.

1. Going to the bank at the beginning of every January and withdrawing €11,000 in €5 notes and emptying them into a pile in the back garden and setting them on fire. Every Year! Can you imagine it !!??!!.

2. Now also get them to imagine buying all those cigs in one go and emptying them out of the packets into a big pile on the ground. 2x 30 a day smokers, smoke 22,000 cigarettes a year between them. Imagine lighting that huge pile of 22,000 cigs and standing over it and inhaling all the smoke from that pile as deep into your lungs as you can.

Now as a near 20 year smoker who was up to 40 a day himself and who had tried everything under the sun to quit, not even the above was persuasive. Not when the alternative was crappy NRT patches or inhalers, or the psychological or physiological 'pain' of quitting cold turkey.

But now with Vaping on the scene? Hallelujah!! A method of continuing to get my nicotine to feed my chronic nicotine addiction (Fcuk off Caffeine addicts) via a device that is the closest ever NRT to the sensation of real smoking, that one will have become accustomed to completely in little over a week such that real cigs now make you gag. That saves you a metric fcuktonne of money, that as far as your body is concerned has made you effectively a non smoker with all the health benefits thereof, that maintains the hand and mouth habitual occupation which means no desire to snack or graze on treats and thus none of the weight gain smokers who quit despair over.

My throat got used to vaping after a single day. ie. by the end of the first day the vaping wasn't tickling my throat anymore or causing me to cough. For the first 2 weeks I was finding I still had a strong urge to smoke a real cigarette at the keystone times of the day. First thing upon waking, while having my morning cup of tea, after meals, last thing at night. I vaped the rest of the day in between. Was disappointed at first but then recognised that even if this was 'it', I was reliably only smoking 5 cigs a day instead of 40. The bulk of the savings and health benefits were already kicking in. After week 2 I got some new e-cig juice and bought 24mg instead of 16mg. Boom!! Found I wasn't even craving the 5 real cigs any more. I'd gotten to dinner time without automatically reaching for the packet of real fags and had just automatically reached for the e-cig at all the keystone moments earlier in the day. Upon reflection I realised that another reason was the mental switch that had flicked in my head. For 20 years, 20-40 times a day, my brain had been primed to picture a real cig in my minds eye whenever it felt the nicotine craving. That kind of neural programming doesn't disappear over night. Even though I was now vaping, when the nicotine receptors in my brain started crying out for more nicotine, my brain resorted to legacy programming and pictured a real cig in my minds eye. I felt like I was still craving the real thing. However after about 2 weeks my brains 20 year old programming was reprogrammed and instead of picturing a real cig, started picturing my e-cig. I'd automatically start patting my pocket not for my cigs and lighter but for my e-cig. Thus after about 2 weeks, for a couple of reasons, I literally overnight no longer needed even those 5x real cigs a day. After a couple of months I had a stressful event and dug a packet of smokes out of the back of a drawer. Couldn't even finish one single cig. It was rank and made me ill for the rest of the day.

Another major stressful event a year later caused me to break through that barrier and I ended up smoking for a month. The beauty of Vaping?? After that month I was able to get back on the wagon and switch back to vaping in the space of a single day when I put my mind to it. There was no 2 or 3 week brain reprogramming or keystone cigs this time. Went from smoking 30 one day and back to vaping 100% the next day with no transition period at all nor any cravings etc Haven't smoked a single cig in 2.5 years since then. 3.5 years in total now. 51,000 cigs I haven't smoked and €25,000 not given to the Taxman and Cig companies. When you fell off the wagon with smokes and you gave in and bought that packet. Chances were, that was it. You were back on them for the next few years until you managed to summon the willpower to quit again. The memory of how painful it was to quit puts you off trying again for a long time. However with vaping, the transition is so easy and gets even easier thereafter, that giving in and sneaking a real cig isn't 'game over' for a few more years like it used to be. Its merely a blip and nothing to overly beat yourself up about and its piss easy to get back on the wagon.

If your parents say, "But Betty down the road says she heard these e-cig things are as bad as cigarettes". Well number 1. They aren't. But even if they were, which does she think she prefers. Lung problems for both her and hubby and €10,000 a year poorer or Lung problems for both here and hubby but €10,000 a year richer?? Fact is, is that its not a question of whether e-cigs are safer or not. Its a question of whether they are safer by a factor of 100 or 1000. All the major chemical components of e-juice (Vegatable Glycerin, Propylene Glycol) have been proven perfectly safe to inhale over the last 70 years. The only question mark is over the food flavourings which are proven safe to ingest but not yet for inhalation. Tests are ongoing but chemists will be surprised if there turns out to be an issue based on the chemistry but are doing the tests anyway to be sure. Lots of scaremongering headlines with nothing to back them up once you read the articles. Basically, "We don't know for sure yet". Well, we do know for sure that cigs have 4000 chemicals and carcinogens. I think I'll take my chances that vaping isn't as safe as a lungful of pure alpine air and is 'only' as safe as a lungful of pure alpine air mixed with a few diesel particles from the Ski-Doo that drove past me 50 metres away on the snow piste. Cause thats the level of 'danger' they are scaremongering about that 'they don't know for sure yet' about.

You've got 2 very powerful lobbies that want to either destroy or take over vaping. The Tobacco and Pharmaceutical lobbies. The pharma industry stand to lose billions from their useless NRT therapies never mind all the drugs they sell for smoking related diseases. They've even started to try and advertise their NRT's to 'help' you quit vaping!! LMFAO Right so. I'll quit the Hand mouth part of the psychological aspect of smoking addiction and go cold turkey on that......or......maybe I'll just start dropping down the nicotine juice levels till I get to zero and then deal with the hand/mouth aspect. Thats why vaping is so good because you can do that. Thats why less than 10% manage to quit long term with NRT...because you can't break up the different aspects of the addiction and deal with them separately. (I'm down to 6mg from 24mg now). Believe me, it pains me to utter the words 'Pharma'. I associate it with the tinfoil hat wearing CT folk or anti science alternative medicine numpties. You know, all the BS about holding back cancer cures etc However in this case, its patently obvious they are trying to poison the well when it comes to vaping.

So two big lobbies lobbying governments all over the world, whispering in the ears of the various health ministers. There is a third whisperer though. The Ministers of Finance. "Slow down vaping adoption for the love of God or we are going to have budget deficit holes open up in our annual budgets they likes of which we've never seen before. In Irelands case, if every smoker quit and moved to vaping tomorrow, a 4 billion euro hole would open back up in the budget. Is it any wonder there is scaremongering going on with absolutely no evidence behind it other than when "we burn a silica wick in an e-cig for hours and hours it produces some formaldehyde".....that no vaper could tolerate smoking because it tastes vomit inducingly rank, or "E-cig explodes in guys face" choosing not to mention however that the gob****e had built his own and used a cheap chinese battery or charger etc etc.



Get them vaping. They'll thank you for it. I have my mother vaping and she and the rest of my family thank me for it. I'm a Newsagent and Tobacconist. I've lost 30% of my turnover in the last 5 years, most of it cigarette sales and I still happily extol the benefits of vaping to any customer who asks.....and they thank me for it.