Growing up in Van Buren in the 1970s, Claudette Guerrette started smoking cigarettes as a young teen after sampling her dad’s unfiltered Camels.
“It became such a habit that I couldn’t exist without it,” said Guerette, 52, who smoked about a pack per day for nearly 40 years while living in The County raising a family and working in restaurants. A heart attack at age 45 convinced Guerette to try to quit, and she tried several times with medication and nicotine patches but always relapsed.
Since June 12, however, she has been tobacco-free, along with 12 other former smokers who attended a tobacco cessation boot camp in Presque Isle organized by Healthy Aroostook, a part of the Aroostook County Action Program.
“I breathe better. I sleep better,” Guerrette, who recently moved to Old Orchard Beach to be closer to her children and grand kids, said. “I’m not going to say I don’t miss it. I think about it everyday. It’s like I threw away my best friend.”
Fifty years after the U.S. Surgeon General’s warnings about smoking’s risks, tobacco addiction continues to affect health and well-being, causing cancers, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other problems. The smoking rate among Maine adults has declined from 27 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2012, and teen smoking has fallen from more than 30 percent in the early 1990s to 10.7 percent in 2015. At the same time, Maine’s rate of adult smoking remains higher than the rest of New England and the U.S. average, and in Aroostook County, 26 percent of adults were smoking as of 2012, the most of any state region tracked by state health officials.
“We’re an older state, and if we’re not taking care of ourselves, we’re not going to be able to stay in our homes and live a long and healthy life,” Jo-Ellen Kelley, a community educator with Healthy Aroostook who led the boot camp, said.
Funded by the Maine Cancer Foundation, the boot camp is a somewhat new approach to helping smokers quit and was the first of its kind held in Maine. The 25 participants arrived on a Friday night at Northern Maine Community College and woke up at 5 a.m. the next day for a session on deep-breathing — before any coffee, a “trigger” for smokers, Kelley said.
After breakfast, they cycled through activity sessions and classes on addiction, nutrition and exercise. They could receive acupuncture and massages or start learning a new hobby, such as woodworking or home repair.
“They were bombarded nonstop, and then they’d have to do a little walking activity,” Kelley, a former smoker herself, said. “It tries to take care of the whole person.”
Some of the smokers at the boot camp saw benefits while they were still there. One 58-year-old man, Kelley recalled, had to stop and rest while walking through the parking lot when he arrived, but he soon increased his stamina.
“It was only a couple days,” she said. “He wasn’t smoking and learned to breathe deep, something smokers often don’t do.”
After six months, more than half of the original participants are smoke-free, a relatively successful rate compared to other quitting methods, Kelley said. Some 7 percent of smokers are able to quit on their own without any aids on a given attempt, while about 25 percent of smokers using medication end up remaining smoke free after six-months, according to the American Cancer Society.
“I find myself more active,” Guerrette said. “I like to walk a lot, I do more reading, I crochet and knit, and craft; I like to paint, make puzzles. You’ve got to replace the cigarette smoking with something else.”
She also is planning on earning a college degree.
The boot camp cost about $750 per participant to run, and Kelley and others with ACAP are considering trying to offer a similar cessation program to large employers who count smokers in their workforces and usually pay for it in their health insurance costs.
As one of the original public health groups set up with tobacco company settlement funds in 1998, Healthy Aroostook also is still waging a slow and steady battle for prevention, trying to stop teenagers from smoking in the first place.
In the 2015 Maine youth health survey, 15 percent of Aroostook County high schoolers said they had smoked a cigarette in the last month, compared with 10.7 percent statewide. About 28 percent of Aroostook high schoolers said they had smoked cigarettes or cigars, used a vaporizer or consumed oral tobacco products in the last month, compared with 23 percent statewide.
In Presque Isle, people walking along a pedestrian path in the morning will sometimes notice a number of students smoking there, next to a parking lot across from the high school — and some have complained about that and about smokers at other public places, such as entrances to stores, Kelley said.
“People who care about their health and use the path walking their children or dogs do not want to have the butts and smoke,” she said.
For the high school smokers along the pedestrian path, Kelley still isn’t sure what the right response should be.
“If we move them along, they’re just going somewhere else. It’s a social network type of thing. We worry it’s where a lot of habits are picked up, and it isn’t just tobacco,” she said.
Smokers also are seen along Route 1 across from the University of Maine at Presque Isle and along the edges of Northern Maine Community College. The two colleges went tobacco free in the last two years, forcing students to venture off the property. Likewise, at the edges of the longtime tobacco-free Aroostook Medical Center, workers who smoke find a place to go, including new residential streets.
While smoke-free property bans may still expose the public to secondhand smoke, compared to designated smoking areas, tobacco’s declining acceptance may be a nudge for smokers to quit, Kelley said. She quit smoking in 1991, after a visit to a hypnotherapist and a realization that smoking in public was becoming less convenient.
“Any time you have a positive affirmation, you can do it,” Kelley said.