Christie Kane and Dan Perley, Victoria, BC

..story’s by people who quit smoking together.. 

We both made a commitment to stop abuse in our communities and decided to start with ourselves by stopping smoking.

We want to inspire others in our community of Sooke, B.C. to quit, which is especially critical given the high smoking rate in the First Nations population. It makes us very sad to see youth and pregnant mothers smoking, not because they enjoy it, but because they can’t give it up. We are determined to let everyone know that if we can quit – anybody can!

Last year, I (Christie) was one of the winners of the Quit Now & Win contest (co-sponsored by BC Lung Association). What motivated me to quit smoking was to imagine the feeling of being healthier, stronger, and free from our addiction.

We both also highly recommend the book "The Easy Way" by Allen Carr as a helpful tool in quitting smoking.

Gail Francis

Quitting together is very powerful. If it weren’t for my partner Louise, I would have smoked one thousand times. That’s because when you give someone your word, you’d better stick to it. I kept at it because it would have been harder for me to see Louise disappointed in me if I didn’t quit. I started quitting gradually. I had just got a new car and so I promised that I wouldn’t smoke in the car. Then, I stopped smoking in the house. For me, it was easier to chunk it out like that. I had tried to quit smoking in the past about five times. But this is the first time that I quit together with someone. I think it made a difference. When you make a statement that you’re going to quit, you’ve got a real-life conscience living with you. I knew that I couldn’t smoke in front of Louise. She would say, if you do that, then I’ll be tempted. So, I felt responsible for her. I’d been diagnosed with early COPD, so since quitting, I’ve noticed that I’m breathing better and coughing much less. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary of quitting on November 11th.

How come people are still lighting up?

When your parents were young, people could buy cigarettes and smoke pretty much anywhere — even in hospitals! Ads for cigarettes were all over the place. Today we're more aware about how bad smoking is for our health. Smoking is restricted or banned in almost all public places and cigarette companies are no longer allowed to advertise on TV, radio, and in many magazines.

Almost everyone knows that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, and heart disease; that it can shorten your life by 10 years or more; and that the habit can cost a smoker thousands of dollars a year. So how come people are still lighting up? The answer, in a word, is addiction.