Easy Way to Stop Smoking (3 page)

I was in no doubt that EASYWAY would work just as effectively for other smokers as it had for me. However, when I contemplated putting the method into book form, I was apprehensive. I did my own market research. The comments were not very encouraging:

‘How can a book help me to quit? What I need is willpower!'

‘How can a book help me cope with the terrible withdrawal pangs?'

In addition to these pessimistic comments, I also had my own doubts. During a seminar if it became obvious that a client had misunderstood an important point, I was able to correct the situation. But how would a book be able to do that? When I was studying to be an accountant and didn't understand or agree with a certain point in a book, I remember the frustration because you couldn't ask a book to explain. I was also well aware that many people were no longer accustomed to reading.

Added to all these factors, I had one doubt that overrode the rest. I wasn't a writer and was very conscious of my limitations in this respect. I was confident that I could sit down face-to-face with any smoker and convince them how easy and enjoyable the process of quitting can be, but could I translate that ability into the written word? Thankfully I needn't have worried. In the twenty-six years since EASYWAY first appeared on the shelves, we have received
tens of thousands of letters and emails from grateful readers containing comments such as:

‘It's the greatest book ever written.'

‘You are my guru.'

‘You are a genius.'

‘You should be knighted.'

‘You should be Prime Minister.'

‘You are a saint.'

It is wonderful and humbling to receive letters such as these, and I hope that I have not allowed such comments to go to my head. I'm fully aware that those comments were made not to compliment me on my literary skills, but in spite of my lack of them. They were made because whether your preference is to read a book, watch an online webcast or to attend a seminar:

ALLEN CARR'S EASYWAY METHOD WORKS!

Not only do we now have a network of over 150 seminar centers, including locations across the US, but this book has now been translated into more than forty languages. As I write, it is the number one non-fiction bestseller in Russia and it has also topped bestseller lists in Holland, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, Spain and the UK. It is rarely out of the top 50 bestsellers on Amazon's European websites, and it is one of their most reviewed books, receiving over 1,100 five-star ratings—the highest available. My Norwegian publisher tells me that when the wonderful
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
was launched, it did not dislodge EASYWAY from the number one spot!

After approximately a year of running stop smoking seminars, I thought I had learned everything there was to know about helping smokers to quit. Amazingly, I still learn something new practically every day. This fact caused me some concern when I was asked to review the original edition and write
this brand new US one. I feared that I would have to amend or retract practically everything I had written.

Again, I needn't have worried. The basic principles of EASYWAY are as sound today as when I first committed them to paper in 1985. The beautiful truth is:

IT IS EASY TO STOP

That is a fact. My only challenge is to convince smokers that it's true.

At the seminars we try to achieve perfection. Every single failure hurts us deeply because we know that every smoker can find it easy to quit. When smokers fail, they tend to blame themselves but we regard the failure as ours—we failed to convince those smokers just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit and to stay quit. This is why we offer a money-back guarantee to all our seminar attendees. While initially this money-back concept nearly gave my bank manager a heart attack, over the past twenty-five years his fear has proved to be unfounded as fewer than 5% of attendees make a claim for a refund.

When I started to conduct seminars to help smokers, I originally believed that my biggest enemy would be the tobacco industry. While it is true that they have been less than friendly, amazingly my main obstacles have in fact been the very institutions that I thought would be my greatest allies: the media, the Government and the tobacco control establishment.

I'm a fan of old movies and I recently watched the marvelous
Sister Kenny
. It's a somewhat obscure film from the 1940s starring Rosalind Russell. It tells the astonishing (and true) story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who worked with children suffering from infantile paralysis or polio. During the first half of the twentieth century until the discovery of a vaccine in 1954, the word ‘polio' engendered the same fear as the word ‘cancer' does today. The effect of polio was not only to paralyze the legs and arms but also to distort them. The established medical treatment of the time was to put the limbs in
irons in an attempt to prevent the distortion. The result was paralysis for life.

Sister Kenny rightly believed that the irons actually prevented recovery and demonstrated a thousand times over at her clinic that the muscles could be retrained to enable children to once again walk. However, Sister Kenny wasn't a doctor, she was merely a nurse. How dare she dabble in an area that was confined to qualified doctors? It didn't seem to matter that Sister Kenny had found a solution to the problem and had proved her solution to be effective. The children treated by Sister Kenny knew she was right; so did their parents. Yet the Australian medical establishment not only refused to adopt her methods but also banned her from practicing. In 1940, after thirty years of rejection, Sister Kenny moved to the U.S. where she was eventually viewed as a miracle worker. In 1952 she was voted America's Most Admired Woman.

I first saw that film years before I discovered EASYWAY. It is a wonderful and entertaining story, but surely Hollywood had used a large slice of artistic license for dramatic effect? Sister Kenny couldn't possibly have discovered something that the medical establishment had failed to. Surely the medical profession weren't the dinosaurs they were being portrayed as? How could it possibly have taken these intelligent, devoted men and women of science twenty years to accept the facts that were staring them in the face?

They say that fact is stranger than fiction. I apologize to the makers of Sister Kenny for accusing them of using artistic license. I now know first-hand the difficulties she faced. Like Sister Kenny, I'm just a lone individual without the support of the big pharmaceutical companies or the major tobacco control charities such as the American Cancer Society, the Lung Association or the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Like her, I'm only famous because my approach works. Like her, the medical establishment has ignored the experience of millions of real
people who have successfully quit using my simple, drug-free approach. Like Sister Kenny, I naively thought that once the establishment had seen the efficacy of my approach, they would not hesitate to adopt it. I could not have been more wrong.

You might draw the conclusion that I am no respecter of the medical profession. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of my sons is a doctor and I know of no finer profession. Indeed we receive more referrals to our centers from the medical profession than any other source, and surprisingly, more of our clients come from the medical profession than from any other.

In the early years, I was regarded by the medical profession as being a combination of charlatan and quack. However, in August 1997, I had the great honor to be invited to address the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health, hosted by the World Health Organization, in Beijing. I believe I am the first person with no medical qualifications to receive such an honor. The invitation itself was a measure of the progress we have made in establishing EASYWAY in the mainstream of stop smoking methods. However, I was disappointed to find that my lecture fell on deaf ears. The attendees (mainly public health policymakers and tobacco researchers) seemed able only to think in terms of drug-based approaches to quitting (e.g. treating nicotine addiction by prescribing nicotine). This was fortunate and convenient, as the conference itself was sponsored by the manufacturers of nicotine replacement products.

It occurred to me at that conference that almost none of the people in the field of trying to help smokers to quit had ever been smokers themselves. They may have known the molecular structure of nicotine and the impact of continuous exposure to the tars contained in tobacco on the human body, but none of them really understood smokers and smoking. As a result, they knew absolutely nothing about the reality of quitting.

As a consequence of this enormous gap in their knowledge, the medical establishment's strategy was (and is to this day) to
tell smokers what they already know: that they shouldn't smoke because it is disgusting, anti-social, dangerous and expensive. Let's face it, if this strategy worked, there wouldn't be any smokers. Smokers don't smoke for the reasons they shouldn't smoke—every smoker knows that already and if it were going to make them quit, it would have done so years ago.

Even today, the medical profession seems adamant that nicotine replacement products or anti-depressants need to be used when smokers are trying to stop. While we are told that such treatments ‘can double your chances' of quitting, the truth is that when all is said and done, such treatments have an 85–95% failure rate (depending on which research you read). Why doctors continue to prescribe treatments with such poor levels of success eludes me entirely, particularly when there is a fast, cheap alternative which has been proved effective many thousands of times over many years.

As I write this, the health authorities have just announced the launch of yet another media campaign aimed at discouraging children from starting to smoke by the use of frightening visual images. I recently appeared on TV along with a doctor representing Action on Smoking & Health (ASH), who had never smoked a day in her life and had never cured a single smoker. She categorically informed viewers that this campaign would discourage thousands of children from smoking and thereby save hundreds, or maybe thousands of lives. Sadly, the statistics don't give cause for such optimism. Studies from around the world show that levels of smoking amongst teenagers, particularly teenage girls, have never been higher.

I mention this because it demonstrates the profound lack of understanding that much of the health establishment has of smoking and smokers. So long as teenagers perceive smoking as cool, anti-establishment and a badge of independence and adulthood, they will experiment, irrespective of what the health establishment tells them about the long-term dangers. They know that one cigarette
won't kill them, and believe they could never get hooked on something that tastes so disgusting. Isn't that how we all started?

It staggers me that the medical establishment hasn't yet figured out what every parent on the planet knows—that the best way to guarantee that our teenagers start smoking is to tell them not to.

In the original edition of this book I wrote:

‘There is a wind of change in society. A snowball has started that I hope this book will help turn into an avalanche.'

Twenty-five years and over 11,000,000 copies later, I think the snowball has grown into the size of a bowling ball, but it is still only a drop in the ocean. While the tobacco-control establishment pats itself on the back over their latest ‘victory', every year an estimated 5 million smokers will die as a direct result of their addiction and they will be replaced by over 10 million new teenage smokers. This doesn't look, smell or sound like ‘victory' to me.

I'm immensely grateful to the millions of ex-smokers who have attended our seminars, read my books, watched the webcast and have recommended EASYWAY to their friends, relatives and colleagues and I dearly hope that they continue to do so.

It is this word of mouth that will turn the bowling ball into an avalanche. While the medical profession continues to prescribe the latest pill or potion (many of them actually containing the drug you are trying to kick), more and more smokers will turn to the common sense, painless solution offered by EASYWAY.

The truth is, as we have demonstrated countless thousands of times over the years, that it can be easy and enjoyable to stop smoking. Do you have a feeling of doom and gloom? Forget it. I've been lucky to achieve some wonderful things in my life. By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of nicotine addiction. I escaped over twenty-five years ago and still can't get over the joy of
being free. There is no need to feel miserable. There is nothing bad happening. On the contrary, you are about to achieve what every smoker on the planet would love to achieve: TO BE FREE!

P
erhaps I should begin by describing my credentials for writing this book. No, I am not a doctor or a psychologist; my qualifications are far more relevant. I spent thirty-three years of my life as a hardcore smoker. In the later years I smoked a hundred a day on a bad day, and never less than sixty.

During my life I had made dozens of attempts to stop. I once stopped for six miserable months. I hated every minute of it, still standing near smokers trying to get a whiff of the tobacco.

With most smokers, it's a case of ‘I'll stop before something happens to me.' The ‘something' was already happening to me. I already had reached the stage where I knew cigarettes were killing me. I had a permanent headache, which I thought was
normal, from the pressure of the constant coughing. I could feel the continuous throbbing of the vein that runs vertically down the center of my forehead, and I honestly believed that at any moment there would be an explosion in my head and I would die from a brain hemorrhage. It bothered me and it scared me, but it still didn't stop me from lighting the next one.