Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 24/99) - The Tobacco Action Yellowknife quit-smoking group has reached the end of its journey, or at least at a crossroads.

Last Wednesday saw the last of seven weekly meetings that had brought together 11 individuals from a variety of backgrounds who shared one common purpose -- to stop smoking and stay stopped.

Dr. Ross Wheeler and Gail Gaudon had led the group through a journey of support and awareness. At Wednesday's meeting there were numerous testimonies about the importance of the group to the success of the members in quitting -- seven of the original 11 attended the meeting and there were reports that at least one other man was still quit. Eight of 11 makes for a 72 percent success rate -- a high for a quit-smoking group, though the game's not over, and may never be over.

On a personal level the group has worked wonders, and without the weekly discussion and laughter -- as well as the potential for guilt and humiliation brought on by my very public efforts to quit -- I would never have made it this far.

But now what?

That was the question on everyone's lips. Wheeler had told us the week before that we basically had three options -- to simply go about the business of staying quit individually, to set up informal meetings or to join another kind of support group.

One such group is the local chapter of Nicotine Anonymous, or Smokers Anonymous as it is know in Yellowknife. Wheeler had helped launch the group when he quit smoking one and a half years ago, and two founding members, Kelly and David showed up two weeks ago to provide the group with a mixture of warning, advice and insight.

Kelly was a perfect case in point -- a woman who began smoking at age 17 and quit 12 years late to become what she described as, "the epitome of the obnoxious, self-righteous ex-smoker."

"I said smokers were losers...and never dreamed I was an addict myself," she said.

Kelly fell off the wagon after 11 years as a non-smoker, eventually waging a struggling and expensive campaign to finally quit again. She said the group approach and openness of Smokers Anonymous has worked for her and, though she's been quit for 19 months, has no intention of not attending the group's Wednesday night meetings at Northern United Place.

"My kids say, 'Why do you go; you're not a smoker?'" she said, "but I don't ever want to forget what it was like to quit smoking or sink into the complacency of the first time."

As David described his own success in kicking a 27-year-old habit, "I can't talk about tomorrow -- it's not here yet."

Wheeler said the group's non-smokers don't even consider themselves non-smokers but rather non-smoking smokers.

"It's like going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where everyone says they're alcoholics but nobody's drinking," he said, "but if you go into a bar where everyone's drinking, no one will admit to being an alcoholic."

Whether such circular reasoning helped or not is uncertain, but though our own session was coming to an end the mood at Wednesday's meeting was not one of panic but of relaxed and confident concern. A quick, informal poll indicated that most members would give the Smokers Anonymous group a shot, hoping to stay quit with the help of group support.

Smokers Anonymous meets at 7:30 every Wednesday in Room 205 of Northern United Place.

And Miriam Wideman of Yellowknife's branch of Health and Social Services, which sponsored my quit-smoking group, announced a second session for beginners would start May 5 and run for seven weeks. Group leader said Victoria Day may be the quit-smoking D-Day this time around.