It's not just that you will live longer if you quit,
but you will feel better, a lot better. If you could smoke and then have no ill effects but to die a couple of years sooner, that would be fine with me. However, that is not what really happens. It’s a quality of life decision. Instead of just dying sooner, you get a lot of nasty chronic effects from being more susceptible to colds, flu, etc, to not being able to be active, to emphysema, etc. You can’t smoke in most buildings anymore so you have to go outside to smoke. You stink and look older (doesn’t matter to you now, but wait until you are 35 and look 45).

All of that said, I used to love to smoke and it probably took me 10 years to really quit. As to the patches, if you leave them on at night, you get really intense and amazing dreams. This is because the nicotine does something like increasing the synapse firing in your brain and also causing the release of a bunch of other chemicals, (sorry I don’t know exactly what it is but I’m a geologist, not a doctor).

Good Luck.
(MichaelS wasn't picked again, Thu 4 Jun 2009, 13:11, Reply)