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Former Charlotte resident Bryan Price called the North Carolina Tobacco Use Quitline many times while he was struggling to quit using snuff over the past year. “I felt like I was wearing that phone line out; I had them on speed-dial,” said Price, 28, who has been “spit-free” for two months, and has now returned to his home-town in Georgia to work at his family’s business. Price found his Quit Coaches to be very understanding and non-judgmental, many of them being former tobacco-users themselves.
The NC Tobacco Use Quitline is funded by the NC Health and Wellness Trust Fund. Services are free and available to anyone within the state 8 a.m. until 3 a.m. daily. Spanish language Quit Coaches are available, and translation services are available for many other languages.
Quit Coaches help a user assess his or her tobacco addiction, and set up a plan to quit. They can even call back, on request, to check on progress and sign quitters up for an on-line program. Mecklenburg County averages about 56 new callers per month to the Quitline. Like most tobacco-users, Bryan started experimenting with tobacco as a teenager, but became a regular, addicted user, when he started living alone in 2001.
Knowing that spit tobacco can increase his risk of mouth and other head and neck cancers, Price looked up gross photos of these cancers on the internet. While he found them scary, they weren’t scary enough to make him quit, even though he wanted to. “In my convictions, I believe that it’s wrong, and I always did,” Price said of this tobacco habit. When he married, he didn’t tell his bride, Ashlea, that he was addicted to tobacco. “I would tell myself that, when I get married, I would quit,” he said. “I thought I could control it, but I couldn’t. It controls you.”
Price’s wife discovered his secret about a year into the marriage, and laid down the law. She was going to be supportive, but he was going to have to quit. Just being able to talk honestly to Quit Coaches at the Quitline was a step to success for Price. “Since they were people who were so kind, but I didn’t know, it helped a lot, because I could be completely honest,” he said.
The Quitline had good suggestions for Price, such as chewing on raw carrots to keep his mouth busy during cravings. “I ate a lot of carrots,” he said. He also called the Quitline during cravings, and they would help him get past them – on to a tobacco-free life. Another thing that helped a lot, according to Price, was getting a job in an office where using tobacco was not allowed. And while he realized his job would have paid for prescription medicines to help him quit, he had not admitted to being a tobacco-user, so he was afraid to take advantage of the insurance coverage.
Studies show that using medicine along with the Quitline can more than double the chances that a quitter willbe successful. The two most supportive things an employer can do to help employees quit are: 1) creating a tobacco-free workplace and 2) paying for cessation services and medicine.
Price is confident he is now tobacco-free for life, thanks to the NC Tobacco Use Quitline. He feels that his new tobacco-free self is the person he wants to be from now on. “One thing I’ve learned is that your character is who you are all the time; you can’t just turn it off and on,” Price said. “When something controls your life, you do have a problem.”
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