Hi MichaelJames. I'm just over 7 months tobacco free. It was really hard to quit, but not impossible. Use all the principles you used to quit the other drugs like waiting out the cravings, examining why you want to smoke, etc. as they will help. I found a quit smoking program on the Canadian Cancer Society's website to be quite helpful for me. Not sure if it will work for you, but anything is worth a try, right? Here's the link in case you are interested:
http://ccs.stopsmokingcentre.net/aux...itProgram.aspx
I read the PDF located in the Helpful Resources part of the site:
http://ccs.stopsmokingcentre.net/custom/selfhelp.aspx
I used tapering to quit as I felt that the patch/gum/lozenges were just postponing the inevitable that I had to give up nicotine. I kept a journal of every cigarette I had, reasons why I smoked it, and the time I smoked it. From there I realized I smoked about 12 sticks a day, so I evenly spaced them out on the first couple of days - I had one every hour whether I wanted it or not. Then I moved it out to 90 minutes after four days, and so on until my official quit date. I found it helped with breaking both the chemical and psychological parts of the addiction.
I still get cravings from time to time - I don't think that will ever go away. But I am diligent in my efforts to stay smoke free.
Hope this helps! Keep us posted, and good luck with the quit!