I smoke, and probably have smoked, for a longer period than some of you have been alive.  In fact, I can name the exact day I 'came out of the closet', so to speak.  It was my 16th birthday, November 13th, 1965.  This doesn't justify it in any means, in fact, more power to those that are trying to quit or have never smoked in the first place.  It's a thoroughly disgusting habit.  Bah, patooey!  I personally find cigarette smoke highly irritating and can't tolerate it to any extent myself.  (This, after a 3 to 4 pack a day habit.) 

Back in 1985 I started a 5 year plan to kick the habit...didn't work worth a damn, as you can see.  I went from, as I said, about 4 packs a day, to cigars.  Didn't enjoy them worth a damn but figured that was the way to stop, eventually.  Didn't work, found one I liked and went through them like candy.  Each in it's little individualized glass container... very expensive habit.

Went to pipe smoking about 10/12 years ago.  Now pipe smoking is weird because many people *like* the smell of an aromatic mixture.  Hell, I've had complete strangers walk up to me and say how good it smelled.  Doesn't do your mind much good when one part of it is saying,

'You should probably quit smoking it's probably cutting up your lungs something fierce.'

' Ohhhh, someone is smoking a pipe, doesn't that smell GREAT! YOU should smoke a pipe, dear...'

It's sort of like getting smacked and petted at the same time...

What may eventually 'do' it for me, is that fact that bees tend to enjoy it also.  Being somewhat 'bee-phobic', ....ok, a LOT bee phobic, it becomes a rather nightmarish experience to take a walk in the Fall and suddenly realize 50 yellowjackets are homing in on you like sharks to a chumline.  You try to put it out real quick and nonchalantly look innocent as they circle your head, but it doesn't always work real well.

( I once bailed on an attic fire, when, wondering why my handlight wasn't working all that well anymore; found it, and my gloved hand, absolutely COVERED by bees looking for an escape route from their attic home.  Panic city.  The smoke filled attic, by that time, was somewhat routine.... a few hundred bees on my hand was horrific.  Go figure.)

My biggest downfall in quitting, I find, is my somewhat odd mystical mindset, as I foray into my second half century in this rather odd/fun lifetime.  Where smokeplumes tend to take on the shape of weird and wonderful things.  And as you sit by a lake's edge at dawn serenely puffing away, the smoke seems to be copulating with the fog as it rolls off the water in the early morning hours.  How can you turn away from something like that?

Positively mind boggling.

It's like having your own personal censur/campfire you tend, sending messages to whatever deity happens to be banging on my head at that particular time.  Dang near a religious experience at times.