...even if my system happens to be stuffed and not eliminating properly, it shows they are poison.

The glutathione upregulation by tobacco smoke is not an instant pushbutton process. It works like an exercise for immune & detox systems, the way exercise works for your muscles -- when you smoke there is a gentle periodic load, followed by longer relaxation of detox systems, just as there is a gentle periodic load on muscles when you do situps or jog. But if you are in bad shape to start with, deciding to do a five mile jog out of a blue will certainly hurt you.

In addition to the quantity after non-smoking for years, you smoked an additive laden junk cigarettes, likely not made with a tobacco leaf at all, and with filters (fibers, unbalanced CO), which would be analogous of this unprepared five mile jog done in the busy smog filled city streets in summer.

There is also a nutritional side to using properly this ancient medicine to help in mercury detox (via glutathione pathway). Specifically, glutathione needs selenium (400+ mcg/day for smokers) and extra vitamins E & C (to recycle glutathione into reduced=active form). I suspect you were Ok on these requirements, since you are already working on you detox and watching nutrition.

My cousin who has tried to give up a few times in her life, cannot do so properly. Her addiction now is that great, if she tries, she ends up (and I kid you not), sitting up in bed, crying, pulling her hair out and shaking. So what happens? she has to go back to her comfort smoking, even though physically she is unhealthy regardless of diet.

As explained in the previous post, forcing people to quit, by whatever means is no more helpful to their health than pulling out breathing tubes from hospital patients, just because "science" can "prove" that the use of breathing tubes "increases the risk" (in the same pure statistical sense that smoking does for the so-called 'smoking related diseases) of stroke, heart attack, kidney failure and generally odds of dying.

You need to help her shake off the "death curse" injected into her mind by the antismoking con artists (who stand to make big bucks should she give in and quit, first on the pharmaceutical cessation "therapy", then on antidepressants, antianxiety, antipsychotic pharmaceuticals, then on weight control,.... as the baseline). That is the only thing harming her health related indirectly to her use of this ancient medicinal plant, which by itself is only helping her, as her own biochemical networks are already signalling to her quite unambigiously. It is only the "death curse" from the con artists that is truly damaging her health:

[color:"blue"]There was a study in Heidelberg, described by Professor Eysenck in Psychological Reports (1989) in which 528 men were asked whether they, as smokers, were convinced that they would be very likely to develop lung cancer, heart disease, or other 'smoking related diseases'.

The 72 who answered 'yes', while admitting that their views were taken from information in the media, had an almost three times higher death rate at the end of 13 years than those who were not so influenced.

Fear can kill. This has been known since disease was first studied. We are entitled to wonder how many people have been killed more by the fear of 'smoking related diseases' than by any actual disease itself. [/color]

If you wish to help her, bring her in to check these posts, read the articles and books at the links I gave here and then make up her own mind based on both sides of the the story. (I am not making a penny out of any of this, nor anyone I know of at the sites I linked to, whether she smokes or not. )

Just brainwashing her with onesided "truth" (bought by those making big bucks out of it) and pressuring her to quit is cruel and at the bottom of it, as evil as pulling the breathing tubes out of the hospital patients. You commented on her "crying, pulling her hair out and shaking", then you "explain" and dismiss it as the result of a "great addiction".

The "addiction" is not a scientific term, but an emotional and value laden disparaging term, the emotion in question being your own hate for the certain ways of fulfilling ones urgent needs (which you may be incapable of perceiving or understanding sufficiently). You could equally well use such 'hate label' and dismiss the squirming and gasping for air by a hospital patient after you pull her breathing tubes out, as the result of her "great addiction" to the dangerious breathing tubes. The only difference is that in the latter case, the relation and the need being fulfilled is mechanical and self-evident to the naked eye, while in the former case, smoking, it is a much more subtle need at the molecular and bichemical level, invisible to the eye and still largely unknown to the present-day science.