Tony Ferrara Failed 3 Times With Patches Before Quitting on the 4th Try

Tony Ferrara is 45 years old and owns a restaurant in northern New Jersey. He’s not going to tell you which restaurant because he doesn’t want this article to show up when customers Google his business. “I’m not ashamed of quitting,” Tony says. “But I don’t need my Yelp reviews mentioning my nicotine addiction.”

Tony has been smoking since he was 16, when he stole Parliaments from his father’s carton in the kitchen cabinet. By 18, he was buying his own packs. By his mid-twenties, he was at a pack and a half a day. He’s been in the restaurant industry his entire adult life, first as a line cook, then as a sous chef, then managing, and finally opening his own place seven years ago. The restaurant business and cigarettes go together like mozzarella and tomato. Everyone in every kitchen Tony has ever worked in smoked.

“It’s the culture,” Tony says. “You’re on your feet for 14 hours, the pressure is unreal, and your smoke break is the only five minutes of peace you get. Nobody in a commercial kitchen is going to judge you for smoking. Half the staff is smoking. The dishwasher smokes. The line cooks smoke. The servers smoke on their way to their cars. It’s everywhere.”

Tony tried to quit using nicotine patches four times. The first three times failed. The fourth time worked. Here’s what happened each time.

Attempt #1: Age 35

Tony’s first serious quit attempt was at 35. His wife, Angela, was pregnant with their second kid, and she told him she didn’t want cigarette smoke anywhere near the baby. Tony agreed. He went to Walgreens, bought a box of NicoDerm CQ 21mg patches for about $43, and started on a Monday.

“I lasted 11 days,” Tony says. “The first week was okay. The patch was doing its thing. I was irritable but manageable. Then Friday hit. Friday night at the restaurant is chaos. We were slammed. The printer is spitting out tickets nonstop, I’m expediting, the new guy is screwing up every other plate, and I just snapped. I walked out the back door and bummed a cigarette off my dishwasher.”

One cigarette turned into five that night. By Saturday, Tony had bought a pack. By Sunday, he was back to his regular consumption. He threw the remaining patches in a drawer and didn’t look at them again.

What went wrong: Tony had no coping mechanism for high-stress work situations. The patch was handling the baseline nicotine, but a Friday night rush creates stress levels that the patch can’t touch. He needed something for those acute, high-stress craving spikes and didn’t have it.

Attempt #2: Age 38

Three years later, Tony tried again. This time, his motivation was health-related. He’d started getting winded going up stairs and had a persistent cough that wouldn’t go away. His doctor told him his lung function was declining and strongly recommended quitting.

Tony bought generic patches this time, the CVS store brand at 21mg, for about $28. He also told himself he’d learned from the first attempt. He’d be ready for the stress.

“I made it three weeks,” Tony says. “Three whole weeks. I was proud of myself. The cravings were there but I was handling them. I was chewing toothpicks, drinking water, taking deep breaths. All the stuff you’re supposed to do.”

Then Tony went to his brother’s birthday party.

“Open bar,” Tony says. “And here’s the thing nobody told me: alcohol destroys your willpower. I had two beers and I was fine. Third beer, I started eyeing the smokers on the patio. Fourth beer, I was out there with them. I smoked six cigarettes that night and woke up the next morning and bought a pack before I even brushed my teeth.”

What went wrong: Alcohol. Tony didn’t account for the relationship between drinking and smoking. For many smokers, the two are deeply linked. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and amplifies cravings. Tony’s third attempt would also fail to account for this.

Attempt #3: Age 41

Tony’s third attempt started strong. He was 41, increasingly aware that he wasn’t getting any younger, and motivated by the fact that his daughter (now 6) had seen him smoking and asked, “Daddy, why are you eating fire?”

“That hit hard,” Tony says. “She didn’t understand what a cigarette was. She just saw fire near my mouth and was confused. I didn’t want her to grow up watching her dad smoke.”

This time, Tony went to his doctor and got a prescription for patches covered by insurance. He used Nicoderm CQ 21mg, and his insurance brought the cost down to about $20 per box.

He made it five weeks. Five weeks of no cigarettes, managing cravings, feeling better, sleeping better, tasting food better (which, as a restaurant owner, was actually significant).

“I could taste my own food for the first time in years,” Tony says. “I realized my red sauce needed more acidity. I’d been oversalting everything because I couldn’t taste properly. Quitting smoking made me a better cook. How’s that for motivation?”

Week five, Tony went to a restaurant industry networking event. Industry events in Jersey are basically bars filled with stressed-out restaurant people drinking and smoking.

“It was the perfect storm,” Tony says. “Stress, alcohol, and every single person around me smoking. I lasted about 90 minutes before I caved. And this time, I didn’t even feel bad about it. I was just like, ‘Well, here we go again.’ I’d gotten so used to failing that it felt normal.”

What went wrong: Same combination of triggers: stress plus alcohol plus social smoking environment. Tony also identified a new problem with this attempt: he hadn’t told anyone he was quitting. He’d kept it quiet because he was embarrassed about the previous failures. So there was no accountability. Nobody to disappoint. Nobody checking on him. When he slipped, there were no consequences beyond his own internal guilt, which clearly wasn’t enough.

The Gap Between Attempts 3 and 4

Tony spent four years between his third and fourth attempts. He wasn’t planning to try again. He’d mentally filed himself under “people who can’t quit.”

“I genuinely believed I was going to smoke forever,” Tony says. “Some people can quit and some people can’t, and I was in the ‘can’t’ category. That’s what I told myself. It’s a convenient lie because it lets you off the hook.”

Two things changed his mind.

First, his father was diagnosed with COPD at age 72 after 50 years of smoking. Tony watched his dad go from an active, tough Italian man to someone who couldn’t walk to the mailbox without an oxygen tank. “I looked at my dad dragging that oxygen tank and saw my future. Thirty years away, give or take. That image settled into my brain and wouldn’t leave.”

Second, Tony read an article (he can’t remember where) that said the average successful quitter has tried and failed 6 to 30 times before the quit that sticks. “That statistic changed how I saw my failures. Three failed attempts didn’t mean I couldn’t quit. It meant I was working my way toward the attempt that would work.”

Attempt #4: Age 45

Tony approached his fourth attempt differently. He sat down and made a list of every reason the previous three attempts had failed. The list was short:

No plan for high-stress craving spikes
Alcohol triggers relapse
No accountability or social support

Then he made a plan that specifically addressed each failure point.

For craving spikes: nicotine gum. Tony talked to his doctor about combining patches with nicotine gum. His doctor approved it. Tony would wear the 21mg patch all day for baseline nicotine replacement, and when a breakthrough craving hit, especially during a dinner rush or a stressful moment, he’d chew a piece of 2mg Nicorette gum. The gum delivers nicotine faster than the patch, hitting the brain within minutes. It’s like the difference between a time-release medication and a fast-acting one. The patch is the foundation. The gum is the emergency brake.

“The gum was a total shift,” Tony says. “During my first three attempts, when a bad craving hit, I had nothing. The patch was already on my arm and it was already giving me nicotine, but it couldn’t give me more when I needed it. The gum filled that gap. Friday night rush, tickets piling up, I’d pop a piece of gum and chew it and within three or four minutes, the craving backed off.”

A box of Nicorette 2mg gum (100 pieces, fruit chill flavor) cost Tony about $35. He went through about three boxes over his ten-week quit program.

For alcohol: total abstinence for six weeks. Tony made the decision to not drink at all for the first six weeks of his quit. No beer. No wine. No cocktails. Nothing.

“This was harder than quitting smoking, honestly,” Tony laughs. “I own a restaurant. I have a wine list. People want to buy me a drink at the bar. Industry events have open bars. But I knew that alcohol was my relapse trigger. It had taken me down twice. So I eliminated it.”

Tony told his staff he was on a “health kick” and wasn’t drinking. He told his bartender to keep a glass of soda water with lime behind the bar for him. He skipped two industry events during that six-week window.

“My wife thought it was hilarious,” Tony says. “She said, ‘I’ve been asking you to cut back on drinking for years and all it took was quitting smoking.’ She wasn’t wrong.”

After six weeks, Tony started drinking again, carefully. One or two drinks maximum. Never getting buzzed. He’d have a glass of wine with dinner and stop. It took discipline, but by that point, he was far enough into his quit that the alcohol-smoking connection had weakened.

For accountability: he told everyone. Tony told his wife. He told his parents. He told his brother. He told his best friend, Sal. He told his restaurant staff, all of them. He told the regulars at the bar. He posted about it on his personal Facebook page.

“I made it public so I couldn’t fail quietly,” Tony says. “The previous times, nobody knew, so when I relapsed, nobody cared. This time, my mother was calling me every Sunday asking how the quitting was going. Sal was texting me. My servers were asking about it. If I’d relapsed, I would have had to admit it to like 50 people. That’s powerful.”

He also asked his kitchen staff not to smoke near the back door where he used to take his breaks. “I told them, ‘Smoke around the corner, out of my sight line.’ They gave me some grief about it, but they did it. A couple of them even said they were thinking about quitting too.”

The Fourth Attempt, Week by Week

Weeks 1-2: Standard adjustment period. Irritability, some insomnia, cravings that came in waves. Tony used about four pieces of gum a day during this period, mostly during service hours. “I chewed gum on the line, which is a health code gray area, but my staff covered for me.”

Weeks 3-4: The craving frequency started dropping. Tony was down to two pieces of gum a day. His sense of taste was sharpening. He made adjustments to three dishes on his menu based on being able to actually taste them properly. “I reformulated my bolognese. It was a better sauce because I could taste it right.”

Week 5: This was the danger zone. Tony’s third attempt had ended at week five. He was acutely aware of this.

“I was waiting for the thing that would break me,” Tony says. “A bad night, a fight with Angela, a problem with the restaurant. I was bracing for it.”

The thing came on a Thursday. His walk-in refrigerator broke. Thousands of dollars in food at risk. He had to scramble to get a repair tech out, relocate perishables to a neighbor restaurant’s cooler, and handle the dinner rush with half his prep work ruined.

“Old Tony would have smoked half a pack that night,” he says. “New Tony chewed seven pieces of Nicorette. Seven. My jaw was sore the next day. But I didn’t smoke. I handled the crisis, I managed the chaos, and I did it without a cigarette. When I locked up the restaurant at midnight and drove home, I felt like I’d won something. That night was the real test and I passed.”

Weeks 6-8: Stepping down from 21mg to 14mg patches. Tony continued using gum for breakthrough cravings but was down to one or two pieces a day. He started drinking again, cautiously. His first beer in six weeks was at a Sunday family dinner.

“I had one Peroni and stopped,” he says. “I was paranoid about the alcohol trigger. But one beer was fine. I didn’t want a cigarette any more than usual. The connection between drinking and smoking had started to weaken.”

Weeks 9-10: Down to 7mg patches. Gum use dropped to occasional, maybe three or four pieces a week. Tony started feeling like a non-smoker rather than a smoker who wasn’t smoking. There’s a difference.

“At some point, you stop thinking of yourself as someone who’s quitting and start thinking of yourself as someone who doesn’t smoke,” Tony says. “I can’t tell you exactly when it happened. Maybe week eight or nine. But I remember walking past the back door of my restaurant and not even glancing toward the spot where I used to smoke. It just didn’t register. That’s when I knew it was sticking.”

After the Patches

Tony’s been smoke-free for a little over four months now. He still keeps a pack of Nicorette gum in his desk at the restaurant, “just in case.” He uses maybe one piece a week, usually on a particularly brutal Saturday night.

“My doctor said it’s fine to use gum occasionally for as long as I need it,” Tony says. “It’s not ideal to be on nicotine gum forever, but it’s a hell of a lot better than smoking. If a piece of gum once a week keeps me from buying a pack, that’s a trade I’ll make every time.”

His total costs for the successful fourth attempt:

NicoDerm CQ 21mg patches (3 boxes, 6 weeks): ~$60 (insurance copay)
NicoDerm CQ 14mg patches (1 box, 2 weeks): ~$20 (insurance copay)
NicoDerm CQ 7mg patches (1 box, 2 weeks): ~$20 (insurance copay)
Nicorette 2mg gum (3 boxes): ~$105
Total: approximately $205

Compared to the roughly $400 he would have spent on cigarettes in the same period.

What Tony Would Tell His Younger Self

“I’d tell 35-year-old Tony three things. One: get the gum. The patch alone isn’t enough for some people and that doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you need combination therapy. Two: don’t drink for the first month and a half. Just don’t. You can have a beer in February. Three: tell everyone. Put it on blast. Make it impossible to fail in private.”

He pauses.

“Actually, I’d tell him one more thing. Failing doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you haven’t found the right combination yet. I failed three times. Each time I learned something. The fourth time, I used everything I’d learned. The failures were research.”

If you’re on your second or third or fifth attempt with patches and wondering whether to try again, you’re not alone. Tony’s story is proof that the attempt that works might not be the first one. It might not be the third. But every attempt teaches you something if you’re paying attention.

For more on combining patches with gum, check out can you use nicotine patches and gum together. If you’re dealing with alcohol as a trigger, there’s more on that at smoking triggers and how to manage them.

“Four times,” Tony says, shaking his head. “But who’s counting? The last time is the only one that matters.”