My life as a guinea pig

In a few weeks, I'm going to be a participant in a stop-smoking research project. They will be loading us up with Zyban and patches, and we'll have group sessions, where I guess they'll strap us down so we won't climb the walls. Afer three months we'll be randomly split into groups -- getting either no more treatment or various permutations of Zyban/placebo/counseling/no counseling for nine more months, the object of the study being to see whether long-term treatment is more effective than standard-length 12-week programs. I'm actually feeling kind of hopeful about this. Though I've never been able to stop smoking for more than a few hours at a time, I think getting all these goodies will help, especially if I end up in one of the extended treatment groups. I think all the attention will help also, particularly because it's neutral attention, not the "OMIGOD YOU BETTER QUIT SMOKING HOW CAN YOU DO THAT TO YOURSELF" kind of attention that makes me want to smoke even more.

But it will be hard. I like smoking, a lot, and wouldn't even consider quitting if my body weren't starting to fall apart on me.

About this blog: I'm planning on posting all things smoking related, especially news round-ups. Lots of interesting things going on now, with new smoking bans being implemented somewhere in the world almost every day, and also new medical research into the nature of nictotine addiction. Maybe I will also write some reviews of the various stop-smoking books and tapes (well, make that tape, singular) that I've tried.