I so resonate with your last post, it sounds like we have similar backgrounds. And my opinion is that it's harder to QUIT hard drugs, but it's easier to relapse with smoking, if that makes sense. Plus, when you relapse with cigarettes, you now have 20 or 25 of them, vs just a hit or two of dope. I used that line on myself in the earlier days of my quit - if I bought a pack, I wasn't buying one relapse; I was buying 20 relapses. That was a lot less justifiable and more obviously ridiculous and pathetic, and therefore it was easier to stay away from it. Keep kicking at this can. You already know it's in you to leave this stuff behind, because you've done it before in other areas of your life. Keep trying.

What made this time different for me?  Honestly, I was just sick of myself, pure and simple.  I had yet another plan to quit on this certain date (when my chain-smoking partner would be away), and it just sort of dawned on me how pathetic I was making myself with all these grandiose attempts and ideas about *some day* when quitting would suddenly be easier.  I had been telling myself the same old story, and falling in the same old holes, for years. I was sick of quitting.  I was sick of myself.  And I realized that I either had to resign myself to smoking for the rest of my life and let it go, or I had to just quit and stick with it for once and for all.  Doing the back-and-forth dance was too much bullsh*t for one brain to deal with.  Sh*t or get off the pot, as my grandma used to say.  So about a week or two before that Big Quit Day, I ran out of smokes at bedtime.  And I didn't buy any the next morning, because I simply ran out of excuses to justify putting it off.  There was never going to be some magic opportune time, there was never going to be a day that it would all be easy, I was never going to magically grow out of the habit; I had to put my foot down and just stop the nonsense.  This quit really began with a whimper instead of a bang.  One night I smoked the last cigarette in my 20-pack, and the next morning I decided that I wasn't going to buy another pack. And it was super uppermost in my mind that if I had one cigarette, I would be drawing this out for another day/week/month/year. I wanted this whole phase of my life (this "I need to quit smoking" phase) to end already.  And Sparrow, it gets SO GOOD!  It's finally over for me!  Now I'm just ironing out the kinks in my thinking, so to speak. The hardest part is long behind me.  It really does not take that long to get through the muck of it, and the residual stuff is very manageable in comparison.  But the only way to do it is to simply do it.  There's no short cuts or magic beans.  It's finding that inner resolve (which began as simple resignation for me, but it grew into resolve!) and keeping my eye on the prize but my mind in the present: right now, in this moment, I am choosing not to smoke.  Moments add up.