Smoking

We are nearing the end of Stoptober, which means thousands of people across the country will have managed to stop smoking over the last few weeks. If they have, they are now three weeks without smoking and have made it through the hardest part. 

This has given me a moment to reflect on my own relationship with smoking and what it meant to quit. It might even be helpful to others still looking to quit. 

Because I wasn’t an occasional smoker, or a social smoker. I was an inveterate smoker, an addict, always smoking somewhere between 10-15 a day. It was my instinctive response to stress, or high emotion. And more than this, smoking was very definitely tied up in my identity. It felt somehow fully intertwined with my rebellious teenage self, with my student years, with relationships and friendships, with my working day. It had cameo appearances in most of my best memories, and a few of the worst. 

And this mattered, because I knew I needed to quit. I could feel the toll it was taking on my health. I often seemed to have a cough I struggled to shake. In the summer, when hayfever season kicked in, I could find myself wheezy and breathless, especially in hot weather. Above all, I worried about the increasing impact this could have on my wellbeing as I got older.  But those worries were always about ‘tomorrow’. My addiction and triggers to smoke were always about ‘right now’. 

After numerous failed attempts to quit using nicotine replacement, I started to read the Allen Carr book which someone had recommended. While there are many other effective ways to stop smoking, this book helped me to break down every reason I ever gave myself for why I smoked. I fully de-constructed them, and circled back to the crude, underlying reality – that I smoked because I was addicted to nicotine. Break the addiction, and all your ‘reasons’ fade away.  

This is important to remember in current debates around anti-smoking policy, when people talk about the ‘freedom of choice’ to smoke. When it comes to addiction, freedom of choice is a rather awkward concept.

Interestingly, the book also tells you not to try to stop smoking until you have finished reading the book. Which was super handy for me, because I wasn’t quite ready to quit when I started. So, I somehow managed to keep reading the book over a 6-month period. But in the week before my 39^th birthday I worked through the final chapters and on the morning of my birthday, I finished the book, very intentionally rolled and smoked a cigarette and then stubbed it out, resolving that that was the last cigarette I would ever smoke. 

The days that followed were a pretty intense experience. I was in an almost constant state of unease, craving a cigarette, everything slightly a blur, with a lot of my mental space being taken up by inner monologues about breaking addiction and not being a smoker any more. I sometimes found myself walking towards the door of my flat as if going for a cigarette, only to have to physically turn myself around and say ‘no, you don’t do that anymore’. 

After five days I felt the worst of the cravings had passed. After ten days, I no longer had cravings. But there were still some big obstacles to come. Drinking and nights out had always been the thing that broke my previous attempts to quit. I hadn’t drunk anything for the first two weeks of quitting. The first time I did, I met a friend who didn’t smoke. To my slight surprise I found that I could enjoy a couple of pints just as much. The next major test came a week later when I went for a boozy night out with a group of colleagues from work, all of whom would smoke socially. I had a good night and although it felt odd not to be smoking, I never really felt any strong compulsion to do so. I felt like I had somehow broken through to the other side. 

And I had. I didn’t smoke another cigarette for two years after that. I must admit, I have sometimes smoked the occasional cigarette since then. An odd moment of weakness or curiosity here and there. But having fully broken my addiction, those occasional lapses have tended mainly to strengthen my disassociation with smoking. It actually wasn’t very pleasurable after all. It tasted and felt disgusting. I felt notably worse for it. 

Quitting smoking feels like a kind of ‘sliding doors’ moment in my life, where I took a path that has led me to a better life; mentally and physically healthier, somehow more in control. And I feel hopeful that I’ve managed to dodge what would have been a likely future of declining health, longer-term serious illness and quite probably a life cut short. We need to do everything we can to help millions more remaining smokers make that leap. 

Written by Andy from the CancerWatch Team

The announcement that the new government is considering extending the smoking ban is welcome news, but could it signal a much stronger focus on tackling preventable cancers – one that would have the support across the country and Parliament?

It appears the government is considering a major extension to the indoor smoking ban, first introduced by the last Labour government back in 2007. Reports, effectively confirmed by the Prime Minister last week, suggest that the government is looking to dramatically extend the ban to include many outdoors areas. 

The details of this will only be confirmed when actual proposals are published. However, on the basis of documents leaked to it, The Sun newspaper has suggested the new ban could extend not just to beer gardens, outdoor spaces in restaurants and clubs, but also to children’s play areas, and areas outside sports grounds, universities, hospitals.

CancerWatch strongly welcomes what looks like a bold new move by the government, though we echo comments made by Chief Executive of ASH that the priority should remain bringing the smokefree generation policy into law. 

Could this be a Parliament for cancer prevention? 

But what we find most exciting is the possibility that this could signal a much stronger focus on preventative health policy, and cancer prevention specifically. There are some good reasons to hope that this could be the case.

For starters, the Prime Minister’s language. When asked about the policy, he stressed the importance of taking a preventative approach to health, highlighted the 80,000 ‘preventable deaths’ each year attributed to smoking, and talked about the burden of preventable illness on the NHS and the public purse. This follows from a strong focus on prevention in the Labour manifesto

Given the size of the Labour government’s majority, this is important. But there also appears to be broad-based support for this stronger approach to prevention across a wide swathe of British society and across Parliament. 

A YouGov poll suggests that 58% of the public would support the proposed ban, with only 35% opposed. What’s more, it showed majority support across all nations and regions, across all age groups, classes and genders, and among supporters of all political parties, with the sole exception of Reform.

The new outside smoking ban will come forward as part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, outlined in the Kings Speech in July. And the centrepiece of this Bill will be the smokefree generation policy which would make it illegal for anyone born after 2009 to ever buy cigarettes. But this was a law the previous Conservative government had already been in the process of taking through Parliament. There were some Tory backbench dissenters to the policy, but the Bill passed its second reading by 383 votes to 67 in a Conservative-dominated parliament. 

And consensus goes further than this. Obesity and poor diet are also major causes of preventable cancers. The Labour government has pledged to ban junk food advertising to children, but restrictions on junk food advertising featured in all of the largest three parties’ manifestos. And the Liberal Democrats, with a much-increased presence in this Parliament, went furthest of all in their manifesto, pledging to introduce a new levy on tobacco company profits to fund smoking cessation services. 

Properly funded cessation services can play a crucial role in helping us reach a smokefree country by the end of the decade and it should be the extraordinary profits being made by tobacco companies that pay for this, not the hard-pressed public pursed. This is why CancerWatch placed this idea at the heart of our Cancer Prevention Manifesto for 2024. It is not an idea the government appears to be considering yet, though in a tough fiscal environment, the ‘polluter pays’ model should be an attractive one. 

Yet we hope that the proposed extension of the smoking ban signals the beginning of a tougher approach to cancer prevention, in which the government recognises the enormous benefits of prevention – to peoples’ lives and health and the public purse – and is prepared to take on vested interests to pursue this. Let’s hope they grasp the nettle. If they do, it appears they should have broad-based support, across the country and across the new Parliament.