Are there social smokers--yes there are. First thing to note though, no one here at Freedom was a social smoker--at least not when they finally quit
smoking. We KNOW that because they showed up here at Freedom in the first place. A social smoker would not likely ever type the word "quitting"
or "help on quitting" into a search engine. If a social smoker did by chance come upon our site, they would have read for a few minutes, realized
none of this applies to them, and never have gone through our application process.
Now that we have established that the people here are not social smokers, who are the social smokers? Well it is not all the people who you think are
social smokers. Although before I even address this, the term is almost wrong to start with. Social smoker makes about as much sense in some circles as
social leper. There are some people who seem as if they can take it or leave it. I think the term that is used in some scientific communities for these
kind of smokers is "chipper," I think used to describe people who smoke under 5 per day.
But not all of the people who can smoke that way are actually in control of their addiction per se. Some of these people NEED those one to four cigarettes.
They don't think they do but they do. I meet them all the time in clinics. They are spouses of heavy smokers, who basically never bought cigarettes a
day in their life. They "only" smoked them because they were around and to be with the spouse. But when the heavy smoking spouse all of a sudden
gets sick and has to quit, the light smoking spouse enthusiastically volunteers to quit to for support. After all, they figured they never really need
these cigarettes anyway, quitting will be no big deal.
These people are OFTEN in for a real surprise. They will find themselves buying their first pack in their lives, and going through a worse time than the
heavy smoking spouse. Often these people have full blown withdrawals and often, they don't make it ending up being the sole smoker left in the family.
They were not "social smokers" after all, they were full blown addicts who were just at a lower tolerance level than most others. But there is no
guarantee that over time their tolerance would not have increased and resulted in them turning into heavy smokers who would be viewed as full-fledged
smokers by all around them.
The only way for these people to quit and stay off is the same for people who smoke 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or even one hundred cigarettes a day. It is still by
understanding to take and keep control over the nicotine addiction entails always knowing to never take another puff!
Joel
