I Quit Chewing Snuff Hourly At First Attempt
I made my first attempt to quit chewing snuff in October of 1976, by gradually reducing the hours out of each day that I allowed myself to rub it. Each week, I’d move the earliest daily start time an hour later.
The first week, I quit chewing snuff before 10:00 AM. That was pretty easy, since I rarely chewed earlier than that anyway.
Then, the next week, I moved the start time back to 12:00 PM. This challenged me a bit more because now, I forbade myself to have any snuff during the morning WPSBC recess that occurred between 10:10 AM and 10:20 AM.
On some of the weeks, I had to stop subtracting allowed hours, in order to get used to the shorter allowable times that I’d enforced the previous week. Sometimes, it took a month for the cravings to settle down enough that I could cut out more hours with semi-reasonable comfort.
After several months of shrinking the window of snuff-chewing hours, I reached the point where I was permitting myself only to rub snuff between the hours of 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM. I remember the home economics teacher, [Elstan] complimenting me on the effort. Since I had a crush on her anyway, her word meant a lot, for an adult. Indeed, her encouragement enabled me to get as far as I did.
I don’t remember though, why I “fell off of the wagon,” and resumed full-time snuff chewing. But I did, and this unfortunate fact would prevent me from again attempting to stop for another seven years. I may have got going at it again because perhaps once I weaned myself down to three hours a day in which I could chew snuff, I arrogantly believed that I had more control over the addiction than I actually did; that it had in fact, become a non addiction. So I reasoned that I could take a chew here and there during the previously-forbidden hours, because even if the cravings returned, I’d be able to ignore them, or at least, work up to ignoring them in pretty short order.
Well, things didn’t work out that way. One chew in the afternoon became two, and then ballooned to three chews in the morning besides. After but three or four weeks sadly, by February of 1977, I had returned to my usual one-can-per-day snuff chewing levels.
I would not attempt again to quit chewing tobacco until the fall of 1983.
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- All About My Tobacco Addictions
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- My First Time Chewing Snuff
- My Last Time Chewing Snuff
- Snuff Memories
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