I SPENT A SIZABLE portion of my life, including a particularly ghastly day lost in a Panamanian jungle, trying to find ways to break the nicotine habit. Nothing seemed to work - but then, I was unaware of the therapeutic value of gaseous cows.

As it happens, I no longer smoke, but it's not that I have anything much against cigarettes. After all, I did a lot of my youth in North Carolina where tobacco, like moonshine in a Mason jar and mosquitoes and losing football seasons at Duke, is a major part of life's rich tapestry.

In North Carolina, to be against the weed is right up there with asking where Adam's daughter-in-law Mrs. Cain came from and telling mom her apple pie tastes like roast polecat. Tobacco is the lifeblood of Tar Heeldom (or was - maybe they've grown up in recent years).

So North Carolina can take the credit or the blame, as it chooses, for getting me hooked on the smokes - for which I remain indebted to this day. Of my three youthful wishes for life - cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women - the fags turned out to be far and away the least expensive.

In those days (we're talking about half a century ago, mind you), the tobacco companies astutely judged college kids to be tomorrow's clientele and, equally astutely, provided them with all the cigarettes they could puff, and more to send home to grateful moms and dads as part repayment of their higher education expenses.

At least that was the practice at Duke. The campus was so awash in cigarettes at one point that the things became a quite popular form of chips at fraternity bridge, hearts and poker games ("I raise you five Camels and 10 Chesterfields, and I'm not accepting Kools").

The key point is, my first full year of smoking didn't cost me a cent, if you don't count the nicotine stains on shirts, ties, curtains, fingers and lampshades, or the occasional wastebasket conflagration and various blackened scars on desks, tables, chairs and, on one occasion, the top of a door.

There are few things in the world more pleasurable than a vice that comes free of charge. My disillusionment with cigarettes, in fact, began the instant I had to start paying for the blasted things. Just a few pennies at first - this was still North Carolina - but the trend was inexorable.

Flash forward to today. In Britain, a pack of 20 will set you back about 6 bucks. If you nip down to the tobacconist for a carton, take along your bank manager or a note of extended credit. The air in London is getting cleaner because it's either that or bankruptcy.

Long before things reached this not particularly pretty pass, I'd come to the conclusion that giving up the cigs was a good idea. Actually doing it, of course, was something very much different, as any bleary-eyed, jittery, raspy-throated idiot with firesticks hanging between three or four fingers will tell you.

Being by now a three-pack-a-day smoker, I figured my first goal was to cut back to one pack daily. To do this, I devised the idea of smoking a single cigarette an hour, which I figured would cut my maximum intake to 24 fags a day, even if I stayed up day and night.

For the next several days, I passed the time watching seconds turn into hour-long minutes, minutes become day-long hours. I'd look up at the clock, and it was 3 p.m. I'd look up four hours later, and it was 3:15. A day became a millennium, and eternity could be measured in hours.

It was, as it turned out, a complete waste of time, as subsequently were hypnotism, diet changes, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, dependency counseling and scores of TV ads depicting tobacco-tainted lungs as great slabs of poo-brown wax with pit holes here and there like nasty things on the surface of the planet Mercury.

There was - is - a much more effective way, I have since discovered. I am a firm believer in the power of negative thinking, and there are few thoughts more negative than the fact that when you puff on a cigarette, it amounts to inhaling cow farts.

That'll put you right off your Marlboros. Likening smoking to breathing the exude from a cow's backside is the idea of Washington state health officials, who are using in a health ad campaign the fact that the methane in cigarette smoke is identical to the main ingredient in bovine flatulence.

The folks in Washington state say cigarette smoke also contains arsenic, "the stuff they use to kill rats." But that little factoid pales into rank insignificance alongside the realization that I spent 37 years breathing in cow farts.

That's something that will forever stick in my mind, alongside the memory of finding myself neck-deep in a swamp 50 yards from my home in Houston at 3 a.m. and the evening I ate my first and last snail.

As it happened, my tobacco habit was ended coincident with my having to undergo heart surgery to repair the damage done by all that smoking. The night before the triple-bypass cardiac operation, I had my wife Elizabeth bring a pack of cigarettes to my hospital room.

After she departed to get our car out of the pound (the coppers had wheel-clamped and hauled it away during her hospital visit), I opened the fags and smoked all 20 in the last hour before they came in with a needle and put me to sleep.

I awoke from the surgery to find tubes hanging out of every natural orifice and some man-made ones - and my mouth tasting like a burned-out furnace full of leftover Indian takeaways. But I had absolutely no desire for a cigarette, and thus it has been, from that day nine years ago to this.

Well, there was one exception - the morning Elizabeth telephoned me at work to say thieves had put our new car up on bricks and made off with all four wheels, which we were told later were fenced in Scotland. The bricks were the ones I had used to prop up bookcases until I threw them out the day before.

I still wish I'd heard about gaseous cows a lot earlier in life. But I could have used a cigarette that morning.

Thought for the Day: If you exercise every day, you'll die a lot healthier.

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