[Steve]

I've always heard that it's difficult to quit smoking even if you want to. Here's my suggestion: spend a voluntary night in hospital between two heavy smokers who look like skin and bones and are receiving treatment for severe cancer. Have their ex-wives walk in and let them chat for hours about their smoking habits, the surgery they already had, the size and looks of ulcers and the joys of chemotherapy. Have the smokers moan and groan from pain all night long.

I swear this would be much more effective than the warnings they put on cigarettes nowadays. And hospitals could earn some extra money buy offering this as a special to smokers who want to quit.

This has actually happened to me when I got my tonsils out. Unfortunately I didn't smoke in the first place.

[Rishi]

Fear is the key. It worked with me. I was hopelessly addicted to smoking. If I was awake I would be smoking. While eating too. I invented a gadget, which went on my cigarette as a light guard, so that I could smoke in the photographic dark room when I was developing some high resolution technical films, when even red light is not allowed.

I was smoking between 150 to 200 cigarettes(these were normal sized, before king-size came on the market). I tried every trick in the book to quit. Could not. I had lost one uncle to throat cancer from smoking.

Fear did it finally.

In 1967 The report of the Royal School of Physicians definitely linking smoking to cancer and other diseases was published from London. Within a week of this the report of the Surgeon General of USA was also released.
In the third week of March '67 the English edition of the Reader's Digest carried an article by the Times correspondent(Walter Something I think). This was chilling. He was writing his own obituary. He was suffering from terminal cancer of the lungs from excessive smoking. The last sentence was,'It is too late for me. May not be for you.' He died three days after this was published. I was smoking as I was reading it. I finished my cigarette and quit.
I have not smoked after that.

What Steve suggests is rather extreme. But for people like me, a much needed kick where it counts.

Rishi