Will Fly, when I finally stopped smoking - after 25 years- it was not a matter of will power. All the previous times I had tried to stop it was. One of my brothers - who all stopped smoking before I did - told me not to even try to quit until I was ready, that it was so much easier then.

The day arrived when I realized that the fact it would be difficult to quit was not the point, the point was that I no longer wanted to be a smoker. Mind you, I still wanted to smoke - but I didn't want to be a smoker. :)

Do you think that alcohol addiction works the same way? I know they always say one has to hit bottom - well, smoking doesn't have the same component.

One interesting case, although stunningly tragic, was one 54-year-old woman who had been dry for 8 years. When she fell off the wagon she fell really hard- involving nakedness, feces, burnt pan marks on the carpets, the whole bit. I suspect that that is what she had hit 8 years before when she went sober. (She is no longer here; she went down to California to a clinic.)