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Apr 21 04 5:36 PM
Every month I do a single session seminar at a local health department which is set up for kids who are caught smoking and sentenced by the local court system. More often than not the kids who are sentenced in come to the program seeing it as a punishment and what will likely be a waste of time--another effort by another adult trying to infringe on their freedom of choice to smoke. While this may be the attitude of most of the kids, there are a few who leave the session recognizing that the session was valuable and are in fact grateful that they had the chance to learn about smoking and quitting.
Yesterday's session had two kids sentenced to the program--a fourteen year old boy and a fourteen year old girl. The girl came in with the same attitude as most. She wasn't ever going to be addicted because she doesn't smoke much and besides, she didn't see cigarettes as being that dangerous anyway. I suspect by the time she left she may have at least recognized the dangers really posed by smoking, although I couldn't tell if she really understood or believed the addictive power of nicotine.
The boy was another story. He already understood the addiction--better than most his age. The reason he understood it is because he was already smoking over two packs per day and has tried to quit countless times. He was happy he was sentenced to the program and said he would have come in even if he was not forced to if he had known it existed as an option.
I have high hopes for this boy--you could already see that smoking was physically limiting his endurance and was controlling him in numerous ways. It is tragic enough when you see adults under this kind of grip but to see a fourteen year old who cannot really meet the physical and social demands of adolescence because of smoking is indeed a sad thing to witness.
We also had six adults come to the session. Two had quit within the last few weeks and four others were coming in to learn how to quit now. I really didn't have as much time as I would have liked to deal with the adult quitting issues and hope that they find their way here to Freedom to read and learn materials that I could not get covered.
Bill should get a kick out of this. One of the men who had quit over two weeks ago came in with a printed out version of our Never Take Another Puff pdf book. He brought it in so that I could autograph it. This was a first time request--I found it very entertaining.
I am going to kick up a few posts today addressing things that I could not get covered yesterday in the event any of the participants come here to read. The bottom line message I would give to them is the same message that I give to all who read here too, that quitting smoking is fully within any person's capability and the way to stay free once you have quit is simply to stick to the commitment you made the day you decided to never take another puff!
Joel
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