NO MORE BUTS ...; SHUNNING GIVES BIG PUSH TO BREAK AWAY FROM SMOKING.

Byline: SALLY ANN STEWART Local View

EVIDENCE of the health horrors caused by smoking has been around a long time now, even as far back as when I was 15 and sneaking my first smokes. Not that I paid much attention when the surgeon general or Walter Cronkite talked about emphysema and lung cancer. I was young enough to think that things like that wouldn't happen to me.

Twenty-five years and way too many cigarettes later, I see that one of the few advantages of becoming 40 is that I am still young enough to remember how stupid I used to be. And I bet not much has changed for those 3,000 American kids who are going to start smoking today.

Medical science keeps making advances, pinpointing just how terribly awful cigarette smoking truly is for human beings and none of the results are going to persuade the current generation of teen-agers. If they want to smoke, they'll just tune out anyone who tries to tell them that more than 30 percent of those who take their first puff today will die way too young as a result of cigarettes. And all the statistics in the world don't have a prayer of changing that.

What worked for me, what finally made me able to stop smoking, wasn't facts about human biology or disease. Not those clever state of California billboards that seem to line Ventura Boulevard about a cowboy longing for his missing lung. What worked for this overgrown teen-ager is simple: popularity. I got tired of being a social outcast.

Now, after 10 smoke-free weeks, the best advice anyone can give teen-agers with cigarettes in hand is to never start smoking so you never have to quit.

Because quitting is hell. It's also inevitable. You'll have to quit because it will get to the point where you're the only one in your crowd who smokes and nobody will want to share a room with you when you go away on weekends. You'll have to quit because nobody you want to kiss will want to kiss you back.

Because eventually, your friends and siblings will have children and there's no way they're going to let you smoke around them. Or you'll get a new car and you'll want to keep that new-car smell around as long as you can.

You'll have to quit because you'll get tired of everything that goes along with being a smoker. Tired of convincing yourself that it's really not too cold or too drizzly or too hot to have dinner on a restaurant's patio. You'll get tired of people calling you a smoker as though that's a thorough description of your personality and you'll get tired of lying about how you really don't smoke that much. You'll get tired of being embarrassed when people say, I didn't know you smoked.

You'll have to quit because one day, someone close to you will die. And even if they don't die of cancer, it will drive it home that none of us gets to live forever and smoking isn't a good path toward making it onto Willard Scott's birthday list.

So face it. One day you're going to have to quit. And it doesn't matter how you do it. This is an empirical truth: Quitting is crummy. It's also expensive. A week's supply of nicotine patches is close to 35 bucks. Some people make a living off of hypnotizing smokers.

Quitting is lonely. No matter how many people are rooting for you, they can't fight this battle for you. They won't be the ones feeling jumpy, cracking their knuckles, snapping at people who don't deserve it, crying because it's only been six minutes since the last time you wanted a cigarette and here it is again. They won't be spending an entire week doing nothing but not smoking.

Quitting is worse than smoking. I liked smoking. I liked buying 10 minutes of thinking time by lighting up a cigarette. If only I'd known when I was 15 that one day I'd have to quit, I might have found another way to do my best thinking.

Quitting is the hardest thing I've ever done. More difficult than college. So tough that I believe I deserve some big gift from the universe in honor of my achievement.

So I went to my favorite guru and asked him what the world should send as an appropriate reward for all former smokers. A lifetime supply of free video rentals? A snazzy watch? A winning $70 million lottery ticket? His answer: How about an extra year of life?