The best reason for giving up smoking

My life once revolved around smoking, and giving up was utter hell, but Australia Day marks 13 years since I did it, writes Matthew Condon. Here’s a few things you should know about quitting.

This is how I celebrate Australia Day.

Not in any ways suggested by our Prime Minister for Standards, Scott Morrison.

Not by donning the Stubbies (the cloth type) and sinking innumerable stubbies (the bottle type).

Not by sitting my children down and force-feeding them endless lashings of Henry Lawson’s poems. “The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from the bush and town; My spirit revives in the morning breeze, though it died when the sun went down.”

No. I celebrate on the morning of that day by taking in a huge lungful of fresh air.

For this Australia Day it will be precisely 13 years since I gave up smoking. Not that I’m counting the days or anything. (It’s over 4700, not that it’s anything I think about. Much.)

I remember the moment. It was about 11.37pm. (Not that I have a precise memory of the time. Much.)

My wife had gone to bed with our first child, then just three months old.

It was ridiculous, I concluded, to be smoking around a baby, let alone our baby. It was unreasonable. It was selfish.

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Queensland has the highest number of smokers per capita in Australia. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

I would give up, after a pack a day for over 20 years.

For decades my clothes and hair reeked of smoke. I dreaded taking even a one hour flight for the cigarettes it denied me. I resented that there were places in the world where I couldn’t light up. In fact, my life was dictated by ensuring what I did and where I went facilitated smoking.

So on that Australia Day I would slam the door shut on the old me, and step into the fresh air.

Too easy.

No. This is no fairytale. It wasn’t easy at all. It was a living hell.

For weeks I was disoriented. So many cues in my daily routine were inextricably linked to smoking. Having a cup of coffee? Light up. Driving to work? Have a smoke. Just negotiated a difficult phone call? Light up.

Given I’d declared to the world that I was no longer a smoker, bragging away before the nicotine had even left my system and everything in my closet, right down to my socks, still stank of stale smoke, I had to walk the walk.

I felt I was on public display, that all were watching and waiting for me to fail, to expose my total lack of willpower.

MORE FROM MATTHEW CONDON: This is no way for a child to die

I sneaked a few secret smokes. Yes I did. But after what seemed in hindsight a few hallucinogenic months on board a rollercoaster of nicotine patches and all manner of anti-smoking crutches, the world returned to normal. Without smoke.

I was not alone in kicking the habit, or so it seemed. According to Australia’s National Tobacco Strategy (who knew we had one?) that concluded last year, between 2012 and 2018 the smoking rate in Australia for over 18s has dropped by about 1.5 per cent to 14.8 per cent, some way off from the target of 10 per cent, but still better than nothing.

According to Heart Foundation stats, Queensland boasts the highest number of daily smokers aged 15 and over, only behind the Northern Territory and Tasmania.

Still, you can read statistics any way you wish. Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2017 confirm Australian smoking rates have declined by about 10 per cent since the mid-1990s. Other surveys have Australia lagging behind nations around the world.

A boy smokes a cigarette in northern Portugal earlier this month, during Christian Epiphany celebrations when children are allowed to smoke. Picture: Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP

And recent statistics revealed that Australians spend a staggering $14 billion a year on their habit.

When you couple that with deaths from smoking-related illnesses averaging about 7 million per year across the globe, you’re looking at some seriously shocking numbers.

As an ex-smoker, I have absolutely nothing against people who smoke. I defend their right to light up. If people ask me if it was okay that they smoked near me, I say absolutely. Go ahead.

Yet in the supermarket the other day I saw a middle-aged man buy a pack of 25 cigarettes, the exact brand that I had not just enjoyed, but loved, all those years ago. He handed over a $50 note and got very little change.

I later discovered his pack cost $35.

If I was still smoking, my habit would be costing me $245 a week, $980 a month, or $11,760 a year.

Even if I reduced that annual figure to two-thirds over 13 years, to account for inflation and so on, I worked out that I have saved $101,920 since that momentous Australia Day.

Where’s the money? I have no idea. That’s almost worth lighting up over.

@MatthewCondon2

Originally published as The best reason for giving up smoking