Despite the incessant warnings from my family, my repeated resolutions, and all rationality, I am a cigarette smoker. I tend to smoke 15-20 cigarettes daily, not so much for the nicotine (they haven't really affected me for about a year and a half), but just because I enjoy smoking; I like the taste, the satisfying burn in the back of my throat, and the repeated hand-to-mouth motion that satiates my oral fixation. Previous attempts at quitting or reducing my habit centered around organization or replacing cigarettes with gum or lollipops and were all failures because no matter what my technique, I would still be thinking about how nice it would be to smoke a cigarette.
Yesterday, however, I realized as I went to bed that I had only smoked 4 cigarettes all day; I was not attempting to quit, I was not too busy or occupied to smoke, and I had access to tobacco at every moment, yet the thought of smoking simply did not cross my mind. I had been chewing Supari sporadically throughout the day. I had gone through only one packet and a bit of another. Whether this was due to its stimulation, the fact that I was chewing it, or some other previously unknown pharmacological property is a mystery to me, but one thing is for certain: betel nut worked for me to reduce my tobacco consumption.
I know that betel nuts are not, themselves, completely benign, but when it comes down to a choice of eventually having an unsightly scar where my jaw used to be (mouth cancer) or not being able to breath (lung cancer), I'll take the former every time.
