Smoking Story

By Adam Patterson

“Quitting smoking is easy; I’ve done it a thousand times,” Mark Twain is famous for saying. But while Twain was an avid smoker, he would have nothing to say about the difficulties in quitting smoking as a college student.

Quitting is hard enough, or easy if you ask Mark Twain, but there are many things outside of just nicotine that keep people smoking in academic settings, as evident by the litter of butts outside of dorm room entrances.

“It depends on what people are exposed to,” says Karen Derucha, a senior public health educator at Clinton County Health Services and The Adirondack Tobacco Free Network.Outside factors, as well as physiological ones play into efforts to quit smoking.

“When it comes to quitting smoking that’s why we advise people to contact someplace like New York State Smokers Quit Line when they’re ready to quit to help them figure out their triggers, patterns, and what’s the best approach to quitting smoking to the individual,” Derucha says.

Besides the obvious addiction to the nicotine in the tobacco, the other factors like stress and peer pressure are more noticeable in an academic setting. Students are not only subject to job and relationship stress, but stresses of school work also.

Kara Carpenter, a student who was just involved in research with Dr. Renee Bator about smoking litter, thinks the social aspect, especially for college kids, is particularly alluring.

“Once you’re a smoker, you’re in a different social group,” she says, “smoking is something that bonds all people who partake, no matter what background they come from.”

She says that if students are on a break for a class, and a group of complete strangers light up, they connect in a way that non-smokers can’t relate to, and that is how they meet new people.

The thought of losing the social aspect might be a factor in a student quitting smoking. According to Carpenter, there’s also the group of people who say “they only smoke when they drink.”

And why is that? Because when they drink at house parties or at bars, there is often a separate group of people outside smoking, and they want to be apart of it.

I can personally attest to these sentiments. Smoking was something I did out of boredom at the age of fifteen, and thought that if I ever had wanted to quit, it would be too easy.

Then there’s the social aspect of smoking while you drink that kept me smoking, and the social aspect of meeting people, and the stresses of school and romance. For me, it is remarkably difficult to quit smoking at an academic institution.

But Derucha says there is one way that has shown to decrease money spent on cigarettes, and the frequency of smoking for people who do; and it’s a method myself and all other that I know of that smoke hate; the tax hike.

“It’s a very affective method,” Derucha says, and “flavored” cigarettes, for example the popular brand of kreteks called Djarums, have been banned completely. reteks are cigarettes that are half tobacco and half clove, and thus half as addicting, but with twice the tar. They come in flavors, and because of that, they’ve been banned from store shelves.

But unless people who have already started smoking suddenly live in stress free environments with minimal social lives, the nicotine should still take a hold; it has for me.

And of course, Derucha agree that the duration and frequency of smoking are also inhibiting factors to quitting. So a 5 year, pack-a-day-smoker doesn’t stand a very good chance. But there are still others that can be saved.

“I smoked for about two months, but I found it pretty easy to quit,” student Avi Goldstein said, “but I don’t think I got too addicted.”

Goldstein says that it’s definitely tougher to not have a cigarette when people around him are, but the grip of addiction hasn’t quite tightened up; he can still resist the urge to buy his own pack, even though most of his friends smoke.

He is a rare exception to a vicious cycle to student smoking. For Goldstein, he quit because he wanted to get back into shape. For people like me, where fitness isn’t a priority, the only way we quit is if we run out of money.

But Derucha and the Adirondack Tobacco Free Network are trying to change that by promoting a smoke-free environment and a good education about tobacco products.

Let us only hope they set up their headquarters in the student unions buildings of most major colleges and universities; for all our sakes.