Two-and-a-half years ago I gave up smoking, which has meant the flurry of talk about World No Tobacco Day, this week, and Kenya’s unique position on banning or super-taxing aids for quitting has caught my eye more than it would for a non-smoker.
For I had meant to give up smoking for years. Yet, despite all the horrible labels on cigarette packets and health warnings everywhere, it just never felt to me as if it was really doing me that much damage. I had two children and had stopped smoking throughout both pregnancies only to start again afterwards. So, it seemed as if I minded enough not to damage them, but had set aside covering my own health.
But when I finally took the step back to good health, the journey was not at all as I had imagined it. For it was transformed by being outside Kenya at the time. In 12 straight years up to 2018, I sometimes went for two to three years without ever setting foot on English soil. But in late 2018, I was back in the UK, and there everything is geared towards helping you stop smoking.
Moreover, it was an environment of supported stopping that came at a time I had much more reason to quit.
That Easter, in 2018, I had a sudden and weird distortion start in the vision of my left eye — everything had a big curve in it, letters, objects, it all looked like it had been caught in a distortion mirror, which is pretty debilitating when happening to a page of text.
The first big shock was visiting my former optician in Nairobi, who emphasised it was serious and that I needed to get to a hospital, fast. She also asked me if I smoked and was the first person who ever explained to me that smoking reduces the oxygen supply to our eyes, and to much of our body too. So, if I carried on smoking, I was going to lose my sight, which by then was disrupted in both eyes, a lot faster.
That’s a pretty good reason to stop smoking. But, from there, it was so massively easy. Back in the UK, every supermarket has lozenges, chewing gum, pouches, any number of aids to help people stop. They are so popular the country’s second biggest supermarket, Sainsbury’s, even has its own brand of nicotine aids.
Now, I had tried patches and they made me dizzy, even nauseous — just too much nicotine for a smoker like me at 7-10 cigarettes a day, and 20 a day in high stress. But oral nicotine was perfect. I would just take as much as I needed to be comfortable. So, I literally smoked my last cigarette on October 1, 2018.
With the lozenges, I didn’t get any cravings, I didn’t struggle. What I did do was eat a lot more. Smoking had suppressed my appetite and kept me skinny. I became fat in just a matter of months. But I found it easy to follow the instructions on the nicotine and go from three a day to two, then one, and finally, by February 2019, I had my last nicotine lozenge and never wanted another.
It wasn’t until this year, 2021, that I finally lost all the extra weight too, but now I don’t eat more, I don’t smoke, and I don’t use any nicotine. My health is way better and with treatment, my eye sight has improved and I can still drive and work.
But what got me here was quitting aids. And for 30,000 Kenyans a year, that doesn’t come soon enough, and they die from smoking.
There’s no excuse for any of us who smoke: we’ve been told. But giving up with nicotine aids is a game-changer, that I got the chance at, and most Kenyan smokers never will. Which is a government policy, truly, I wonder about. Like, who wins from that? Does anyone? Couldn’t we just think about making aids a bit more accessible, as lifesavers? There really could be other sources for that tax, and more people left alive to pay it.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
