35 Years of Smoking, Tried Everything, Finally Quit with Zyban

I’m James Robson from Louisville, Kentucky. I’m fifty-eight years old. I smoked for thirty-five years. I tried every method of quitting you can name, and some you probably can’t, and I failed at all of them until Zyban worked about a year ago. I want to tell you about every one of those failures because I think the failures matter more than the success.

I started at twenty-three. Young guy, just married, working at a UPS hub in Louisville doing package sorting on the night shift. Everybody on that shift smoked. You’d work four hours in the heat and noise and then you’d get a break and everybody would light up outside the dock doors. My brand was Winston, same as my father, same as his father. Three generations of Robson men smoking Winstons. My grandpa died at sixty-seven of emphysema. My dad died at seventy-one of a heart attack. Both smokers until the end. I watched them die and I still kept smoking. That’s what nicotine does. It makes you watch the people you love suffocate and then light another one.

I switched from UPS to a warehouse management job in my thirties, which meant I was at a desk more, but I’d still find reasons to go outside every hour. By forty I was at a pack and a half a day. Winstons weren’t cheap, but they weren’t the most expensive either, so I told myself it was fine. My wife Barbara, who I married when I was twenty-two, had quit smoking herself when she got pregnant with our first son, Todd. She quit cold turkey and never went back. I was proud of her and ashamed of myself in equal measure. She’d ask me every year on my birthday if this was the year I’d quit. For about fifteen years straight, I said, “Maybe next year.”

Let me walk you through the failures. I’m going to list them because I want you to see what thirty-five years of trying and failing looks like.

Age twenty-eight: cold turkey. Made it three days. Withdrawal was so bad I couldn’t function at work. I was dropping packages, missing counts. Went back to smoking on day four.

Age thirty-one: nicotine gum. Nicorette 2mg, the original strength. The gum wasn’t strong enough for a pack-and-a-half guy. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. Lasted six days.

Age thirty-four: nicotine patches, the store-brand ones from Kroger. Made it two weeks. The patches worked okay for the physical cravings but did nothing for the mental ones. I relapsed at a bourbon tasting at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. Smoking and bourbon go together in this state like horses and racing. Two weeks, gone.

Age thirty-seven: cold turkey again, this time with a self-help book. Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” I read the whole book. It made sense while I was reading it. I quit the day I finished it and lasted eight days. The book said quitting should feel like freedom, not deprivation. On day eight, standing outside a Thorntons gas station at 6 AM, it did not feel like freedom.

Age forty: hypnotherapy. A guy in a strip mall off Bardstown Road. Sixty-five dollars a session, three sessions. He had me visualize my lungs as pink balloons. I smoked a cigarette in the parking lot after the third session. Sixty-five times three is a hundred and ninety-five dollars to visualize balloons.

Age forty-three: Chantix, first round. My doctor prescribed it. I followed the whole protocol. The nausea was manageable but I had bad mood swings. Really bad. I got dark. Not suicidal, but heavy, flat, like the world had lost its color. Barbara got scared. My doctor pulled me off it at week four. I was back to Winstons within days.

Age forty-six: acupuncture. An integrative health clinic in the Highlands. Needles in my ears and wrists. Felt relaxing during the sessions. Did absolutely nothing for my cravings. Lasted about a week.

Age forty-nine: Chantix again, second round, different doctor. This time the mood effects were milder but I still couldn’t tolerate the medication beyond three weeks. The nausea was worse the second time. I was throwing up in the morning like I was pregnant. Stopped the medication, started smoking the same day.

Age fifty-two: nicotine lozenges combined with an app called Smoke Free. I liked the app. It tracked my progress, showed health milestones. Made it twenty-two days, the longest I’d ever gone. Then my mother passed away and I bought a pack at the hospital gift shop and smoked half of it in the parking deck of Baptist Health. Twenty-two days. My record for thirteen years.

Age fifty-five: e-cigarette. A Vuse device. I used it for about three months but never stopped craving real cigarettes. Eventually I was using both. Added the Vuse cost on top of the Winston cost. Barbara calculated I was spending over five hundred dollars a month on nicotine products. She showed me the math on a piece of paper. I looked at it and went outside to smoke.

That’s ten attempts over thirty years. Ten failures. Each one left me more convinced that I was fundamentally incapable of quitting. That some people could and I couldn’t and that was just how my brain worked. Barbara stopped asking on my birthday. She just looked at me with this quiet resignation that was the worst thing I’d ever seen on her face.

In the spring of 2025, I went to see a new doctor. My old one had retired. This new doctor, Dr. Amari at a clinic on Hurstbourne Parkway, listened to my entire smoking history. All ten attempts. All ten failures. She didn’t sigh. She didn’t lecture. She said, “Have you tried Zyban?”

I hadn’t. Zyban is the brand name for bupropion, which is also sold as Wellbutrin for depression. But the smoking cessation version is specifically dosed and marketed for quitting. My old doctor had tried me on Wellbutrin at age forty, but Dr. Amari said the Wellbutrin dose for depression is different from the Zyban protocol for smoking cessation, and that I shouldn’t assume it wouldn’t work just because Wellbutrin hadn’t been the right fit years ago.

She prescribed Zyban 150mg. I’d take it once a day for three days, then twice a day going forward. Like Chantix, you start taking it before your quit date. My quit date was May 5, 2025. Cinco de Mayo. Not for any symbolic reason. It was just a Monday.

The first thing I noticed about Zyban was what it didn’t do. It didn’t make me nauseous. After two rounds of Chantix that wrecked my stomach, this was a relief. I had some dry mouth and a little insomnia the first week, but those side effects were mild. The medication didn’t block nicotine the way Chantix does. Instead, it works on dopamine and norepinephrine, the chemicals in your brain that regulate mood and motivation. The idea is that it stabilizes you enough that the withdrawal doesn’t send you into a tailspin.

I kept smoking through that first week on the medication, as instructed. By about day five, I noticed I was smoking less without trying. I’d light a cigarette and put it out halfway through, not because I was making myself but because I was satisfied sooner. That had never happened to me before. A half-smoked Winston was, in my experience, a tragedy. Now it was just enough.

Quit day came. I smoked my last cigarette the night of May 4th, sitting on my back porch, watching the sun set over the trees in our backyard. I didn’t make it ceremonial. I just smoked it and went inside and brushed my teeth.

Day one without cigarettes was hard but not catastrophic. The Zyban took the edge off. I was irritable, definitely. I couldn’t sit still. I paced around the house. I reorganized the garage, which didn’t need reorganizing. Barbara stayed out of my way, and I’m grateful for that. She knew from ten previous attempts what the first few days looked like, and she gave me space without making me feel alone.

The physical withdrawal peaked around day three, same as every other time. Headaches, sweating, that crawling feeling under your skin. But the Zyban kept my mood from cratering. That was the difference. Every other time I’d tried to quit, the withdrawal would trigger this deep, heavy hopelessness. A voice in my head that said, “Why are you doing this? You can’t do this. You’ve never done this. Just smoke.” On Zyban, that voice was still there, but it was quieter. Manageable. I could hear it and choose not to listen.

The hardest moment was about three weeks in. I was at a cookout at my brother’s house in Shelbyville. My brother Steve smokes. His wife smokes. Most of their friends smoke. I knew it would be a minefield and I went anyway because avoiding every social situation where people smoke isn’t sustainable. You can’t live in a bunker.

Steve offered me a Winston without thinking. He always does. I said no. An hour later, I was standing by the fire pit and the smoke from the fire mixed with the cigarette smoke floating around the yard and something in me just broke. I wanted one so bad I could feel it in the back of my throat, in my fingers, in the empty space between my index and middle finger where a cigarette used to live. I walked to my truck, sat in the cab, and called the Kentucky Quit Now line. I talked to a counselor for about eight minutes. He was a young guy, maybe mid-twenties, and he said something simple that stuck: “You’ve been quit for three weeks. That’s farther than you’ve gotten nine out of ten times. Don’t give that up for one cigarette at a fire pit.”

I didn’t. I went back to the cookout, ate a piece of pie, and drove home smoke-free.

The turning point was gradual. Sometime around week six or seven, I realized I’d gone an entire workday without thinking about smoking. Not once. I was doing inventory reports at the warehouse and when I finished, I drove home and it hit me that the thought of a cigarette hadn’t crossed my mind in eight hours. After thirty-five years of thinking about cigarettes every waking hour, an eight-hour gap felt like a miracle. I sat in my driveway and said “huh” out loud, like I’d just seen something I couldn’t quite explain.

I took Zyban for twelve weeks total. Coming off it was uneventful. Dr. Amari tapered me down over two weeks. I braced myself for the cravings to come roaring back, but they didn’t. They were there, faintly, for a few days. Like an echo of something that used to be loud. Then even the echo faded.

Eleven months now. The longest I’ve ever been smoke-free in my adult life. Here’s what thirty-five years of smoking and eleven months of not smoking have taught me.

My lungs are better but not great. Thirty-five years leaves damage. I still get short of breath if I push too hard physically. But the improvement is noticeable. I can walk the full loop at the Parklands of Floyds Fork without stopping, which I couldn’t do a year ago.

I can taste bourbon properly for the first time. This is going to sound silly if you’re not from Kentucky, but bourbon is important here. It’s a cultural thing. I’ve been going to bourbon tastings for decades and I always faked my way through the tasting notes. Vanilla. Caramel. Oak. I couldn’t taste any of it. I was just tasting alcohol and smoke. Last month I went to a tasting at a distillery in Bardstown and I could pick out the cherry, the vanilla, the hint of cinnamon. I almost said something to the guy next to me about it but figured he’d think I was crazy.

Barbara looks at me differently now. Not the resigned look. Something lighter. She told me last month that she’d been scared for twenty years that she was going to bury me the way I’d buried my dad. She said she doesn’t feel that way anymore. We cried. Two fifty-something people sitting on their back porch in Louisville, crying over a pack of cigarettes I didn’t buy.

I’ve saved a lot. Winstons in Kentucky are about seven bucks a pack. A pack and a half a day, that’s over three thousand eight hundred dollars a year. We’re using it to visit our son Todd in Denver this summer. He’s got a little girl now. My granddaughter. I want to be around to see her grow up.

If you’re reading this and you’ve tried to quit and failed, I need you to hear me. I failed ten times. Ten. Over three decades. The method that finally worked was the eleventh thing I tried. If I’d stopped at attempt number ten, I’d still be smoking. Maybe I’d be dead.

Don’t stop trying. If one thing doesn’t work, try another. If that doesn’t work, try another. There are patches, gums, lozenges, Chantix, Zyban, counseling, quit lines, apps, support groups. The list is long. You haven’t tried everything until you’ve tried everything. And even then, try again.

You are not alone. I smoked for thirty-five years and I thought I’d die with a Winston in my hand. I didn’t. I’m sitting on my porch right now, same porch where I smoked my last cigarette eleven months ago, and the air smells like cut grass and the neighbor’s grill. Just air. No smoke. It’s the best thing I’ve ever breathed.