I just want to give a short testimonial on being an ex smoker. I'm coming up on my 10th anniversary on the 15th of October 1999. I'm a 57 year old ex hippie from the sixties. I smoked cigarettes from the age of 14 to age 49. when I was 46 the doctors told me I had COPD. I tried for three years unsuccessfully to quit smoking. During hippie days I smoked opium for a couple of years and it was hard to quit but it was in all actuality easier to quit than cigrettes. The things that worked for me were the following: I went into it with as many strategies as I could muster. I knew that it would take a lot of smoking guns. I have always enjoyed mind games so I devised in my own mind the image of golden nicotine stained gray matter that was turning darker brown with every new puff. Object: dark brown is death. I forced myself nightly to look at the once grey matter to see how much darker it had gotten with each fleeting day. I also pictured in my head the russian roulette game of "is this the cigarette that will be the one to put the nail in my coffin?" Next psych game I played was "they don't make them any more, you can't beg borrow buy or steal them. there ain't no more of them ugly things out there." When you say my mind games worked for me but, you're not me and they would not work for you, remember this: when you are trying to quit smoking your mind SHOUTS to you ten thousand times a day "THIS IS STUPID, LET'S HAVE ANOTHER CIGARETTE AND FORGET IT". Friend, oh foolish unknown friend I reach across the web pages and say to you from the end of my 50 foot oxygen cord, "PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE have something prepared to say in rebuttal" it's your life you only go round once. Grab for the Gusto!.