Lung Cancer Awareness Month: why I stopped smoking

I’m Iwan and I’m the Head of Communication and Marketing for Cancer Research Wales. I smoked 20 cigarettes a day for about 18 years, but 17 years ago I stopped.

I’m very glad I did stop smoking and I’m not writing this to tell anyone what to do or not to do, but the evidence points to the fact that smoking is clearly not good for you.

Nicotine is addictive

It’s very hard to stop smoking – it’s an addiction, and nicotine is among one of the most addictive substances known to man.

I stopped smoking in February 2009 when our eldest son – Guto, was born, and I stopped smoking because I didn’t want him to become a smoker too.

I didn’t want him to grow up with smoking being something that was normalised in our home, which I felt could have encouraged him to take up the habit.

I think the normalisation of smoking when I was growing up is partly why I began smoking – it was my decision to smoke, and I take full responsibility for that, but when I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, everyone smoked.

My grandfather, my father, my uncles on both sides of the family smoked as had previous post-war generations on both sides of my family before them.

Tobacco advertising

Cigarette and tobacco advertising was everywhere when I was growing up– from JPS and Marlboro on Formula 1 cars, to Hamlet cigar adverts on the TV and on shopfronts where you’d see adverts for Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges.

You couldn’t get away from tobacco and tobacco advertising.

I was asthmatic and hated smoking with a passion – the smell of it made me feel sick and the smoke made it difficult for me to breathe.

It was unbearable but it was something I had to put up with and did.

Teenage years

So, roll on to my teenage years and music and guitars became an increasingly important part of my life.

I still hated smoking, but I was starting to listen to bands like Van Halen whose groundbreaking guitar hero - (who was better than Jimi Hendrix in my humble opinion) - Eddie Van Halen, was a big influence on me.

I bought all his band’s albums and got my first job at 15-years-old to save up to buy a Kramer guitar like Eddie played.

Then there was Guns N’ Roses who emerged in 1987 with their incredible debut album Appetite for Destruction, and their lead guitar player – Slash, became one of my heroes.

In photographs of Eddie Van Halen and Slash, they always seemed to be smoking or have a pack of cigarettes in plain sight somewhere in the picture.

Eddie would usually have a cigarette wedged into the headstock of his guitar and there’d likely be one hanging out of the corner of Slash’s mouth.

I was very impressionable – as are many teenagers, but I do think that your role models can have a very strong influence on the decisions that you make in life.

Obviously, I now know that the way to get better at guitar is to practice – it doesn’t come from playing the same brand of guitars as your heroes, or indeed smoking cigarettes like them.

Patches, nicotine gum and inhalers

I smoked full-strength Marlboro red and then switched to Marlboro gold – which everyone at the time all thought were ‘better for you’ because they had less tar and nicotine in them.

It turns out that ‘half-strength’ cigarettes are just as bad for your health as the ‘full-strength’ ones.

I always knew it was bad for me – especially as someone who’d been an asthmatic child, and I tried unsuccessfully to stop – patches, nicotine gum and those plastic inhalers that gave you a hit of nicotine, but none of it worked.

Breaking the cycle

As I mentioned earlier, it was the birth of our eldest son – Guto, in 2009 that did it for me.

After 18 years of 20-a-day, his birth made me look at my own behaviour and made me realise I wanted to be there for him when he was grown up and break that cycle of ‘normalised’ smoking so that I wouldn’t influence him to take it up himself.

That’s probably one of the most powerful experiences that I’ve ever had in my life and 17 years on, I can say it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Physical and financial benefits

As well as the health benefits, not smoking has saved me an absolute fortune - at 2009 prices, the brand I was smoking was £5.30 for a pack of 20, which would cost around £1,900 a year then, so that’s at least £34,000 that I’ve ‘saved’.

If you compare that with the 2025 prices, a pack of 20 of the cigarettes I smoked is about £16.75 so if I was still lighting up every day - it would cost me over £6,000 a year.

I feel so much better after stopping smoking, but I just hope I haven’t caused myself any long-term or irreversible damage.

I still can’t play guitar like Eddie Van Halen or Slash, but at least now I don’t stink of stale tobacco smoke and neither does our house or my car.

On top of that, I don’t cough every morning, and I’ve broken that cycle of ‘normalised’ smoking and hopefully that means my children will make healthier lifestyle choices for themselves as they grow up.