Easy Way to Stop Smoking (8 page)

You think I exaggerate? Remember those old war movies? The dying soldier is always given a cigarette to ease him peacefully and nobly to his heroic death. What's the last request of the man facing death by a firing squad? That's right—a cigarette. The subtext running beneath this seemingly innocent request is a powerful one. What the message is really saying is, ‘The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be the smoking of a cigarette.' The impact of this does not register on our conscious minds, but the sleeping partner has time to absorb it.

You think that things have changed recently? Not a chance. While TV advertising for tobacco products has been banned for years, the appearance of smoking in movies and on TV continues unabated. Look at Bruce Willis in
Die Hard
or Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon
franchises. These movies, aimed at teenage boys, glamorize smoking in a way a TV ad never could. For two hours Mr. Willis and Mr. Gibson chain-smoke their way through a myriad of death-defying and heroic sequences. The subtext again is very simple: Even heroes need their little friend. What better way to show your cool and rebellious nature than to smoke?

Does this happen by accident, or is it part of a concerted strategy by tobacco companies to promote smoking to teenagers as cool, rebellious and desirable? I'm not a conspiracy theorist but it's obvious to me that if you are in a business where 5 million of your customers die every year, you need to replace
them somehow. Given that over 90% of smokers start before their eighteenth birthday, it makes sense to market to as young a demographic as possible, without being seen to be doing so.

As a demonstration of the tobacco industry's success in promoting to children, for years the American tobacco giant RJ Reynolds ran a campaign based on a kid's cartoon character, Joe Camel. Joe Camel took RJR's market share among smokers under 18 years-old from 0.5% to 32.8% in three years. In research published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, over 90% of six-year-olds matched the Joe Camel character with a cigarette. According to the same research, for a time, Joe Camel was as well known as Mickey Mouse among American pre-schoolers.

And TV is no better than cinema. I recently watched an episode of the otherwise wonderful
West Wing
. Martin Sheen's character, the President of the US, when faced with a difficult decision in a stressful situation, wanders to his private study and sitting alone with the enormous burdens of his office, lights a cigarette. Once again the message being promoted: Smoking relieves stress. Even the most powerful man in the world needs his little crutch.

Think about it, what better ad could you have than actors and actresses we love and admire smoking on-screen? John Travolta, Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Nicolas Cage, Matt Damon, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Leonardo di Caprio, Gwyneth Paltrow…the list is endless.

Who knows whether Hollywood continues to benefit financially from working with the tobacco companies to promote smoking (though this has unquestionably been the case in years gone by) but every time an actor lights up in a movie aimed at kids, the message that smoking is normal, desirable and glamorous is reinforced. That message is filed away in the sub-conscious and the cumulative impact of it being repeated
thousands upon thousands of times during a child's formative years builds a desire for kids to experiment. Perhaps that's why even today, 75% of movies rated G, PG and PG-13 feature smoking in them. Unfortunately, nicotine is so addictive that experimentation all too often leads to addiction.

True, there is publicity to counter this brainwashing, but it's a case of too little, too late. Anti-smoking campaigns fail to effectively reverse the brainwashing promoting cigarettes and smoking for two key reasons. Firstly, they tend to feature sick, and therefore older smokers. Youngsters just don't identify with a 60-year-old woman smoking through a tracheotomy. Anyway, which teenager starts smoking with the intention of smoking for the rest of their lives? Do you think alcoholics mean to become alcoholics? Teenagers believe that they could never get hooked on cigarettes and that they could quit at any time, if they wanted to. So why would an ad featuring someone with whom they cannot identify, resonate with them? Secondly, the campaigns come too late, after the teenager has already become a smoker. As with every addiction or condition, prevention is better than cure. The truth is that these campaigns make little or no difference to children thinking about taking up smoking, or smokers wanting to quit.

The trap is the same today as when Sir Walter Raleigh fell into it. All the anti-smoking campaigns do is confuse the issue. The challenge is not so much to counter the brainwashing as it is to ensure that our children aren't subjected to it in the first place.

For an example of the power of the brainwashing to which the smoker is subjected, and the fear that it creates, one need look no further than the issue closest—in more ways than one—to the smoker's heart. Although we are acutely aware of the health risks associated with smoking, and for the most part don't argue or debate those risks, smokers point to the exceptions to the rule. Every smoker knows of an Uncle Fred who smoked two packs a day, never had a day's illness in his life, and lived to eighty. We ignore
the fact that for every Uncle Fred, there is a Peter Jennings, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, George Harrison, Betty Grable, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis or Errol Flynn. Every day nearly 1,500 Americans die of smoking-related causes. We also ignore the fact that Uncle Fred might still be alive if he hadn't been a smoker.

I highlight this capacity for self-delusion not to try to make you feel bad—I was the worst of the lot when I was a smoker—but to illustrate the extent to which we are brainwashed into searching for any scrap of information that allows us to continue to justify our smoking.

We're even brainwashed into minimizing the problems that smoking creates in favor of demonizing other social issues, far less harmful than tobacco. As a society we are rightly concerned about crack or heroin addiction, yet actual deaths from these drugs are a small fraction of the annual tobacco-related deaths. In 2003, glue sniffing, heroin use and marijuana use caused around 3,000 deaths in the US. Tragic as those deaths indisputably are, they don't compare to the 450,000 deaths caused by tobacco.

Marijuana is often labeled as a ‘gateway' drug, but over 80% of alcoholics are smokers and I have yet to meet a heroin addict who isn't a smoker. If there is a gateway drug it is nicotine.

Governments around the world have a love/hate relationship with tobacco. On the one hand, governments salivate over billions in tobacco revenues but on the other hand they know that this revenue will be far outstripped by the future medical and other costs associated with smoking. So far, greed is winning the battle at the expense of smokers and their families.

One of the key challenges in becoming a happy non-smoker is to see through all this brainwashing and to recognize cigarettes for what they really are. Very early on in our smoking lives we unwittingly elevate the cigarette's importance and place
it on a pedestal. There it remains for the rest of our smoking lives, unchallenged and all-powerful. We need to begin to ask some searching questions:

• Why am I doing it?
  
• What does the cigarette really do for me?
  
• Do I really need to smoke?
  

NO, OF COURSE YOU DON'T.

I find this brainwashing the most difficult aspect of smoking to explain. Why is it that an otherwise rational, intelligent human being becomes a complete imbecile when it comes to looking at his own addiction? It pains me to confess that out of all of the people that I have assisted in stopping smoking, I was the biggest idiot of all.

My father was a heavy smoker. He was a strong man, cut down in his prime by smoking. I can remember watching him when I was a boy; he would be coughing and spluttering in the mornings. I could see he wasn't enjoying it and it was obvious to me that something evil had possessed him. I can remember saying to my mother, ‘Don't ever let me become a smoker'.

At the age of fifteen I was a physical-fitness fanatic. Sport was my life and I was full of energy, courage and confidence. If anybody had said to me that I would end up smoking a hundred cigarettes a day, I would have gambled my lifetime's earnings that it would not happen, and I would have given any odds that had been asked.

At the age of forty I was a physical and mental wreck. I had reached the stage where I couldn't carry out the most mundane task without first lighting up. With most smokers the triggers are the normal, mild stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing. I couldn't even change the TV channel on my remote without lighting up.

I knew it was killing me. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. But what I fail to understand is why I couldn't see what it was doing to me mentally and emotionally. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose. The really ridiculous thing is I never even suffered the illusion that I enjoyed smoking. I smoked because I thought it helped me to concentrate and because it helped my nerves. Now I am a non-smoker, it is difficult to believe that those days actually happened. It's like waking up from a nightmare, and that's about the size of it. Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged—your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst thing about smoking is not the damage to your health or bank account; it's the warping of your mind. You search for any excuse to go on smoking, despite being acutely aware of the harm it is causing.

I remember at one stage switching to a pipe, after another failed attempt to kick cigarettes, in the belief that it was less harmful and would enable me to cut down my intake.

Some of those pipe tobaccos are absolutely foul. The smell can be pleasant, as most pipe tobaccos are infused with artificial aromas, but to start with, they are awful to smoke. I can remember that for about three months the tip of my tongue was as sore as a boil. A liquid mixture of tar collects in the bottom of the bowl of the pipe. Occasionally you unwittingly bring the bowl above the horizontal and before you realize it you have swallowed a mouthful of the filthy stuff. The result is to throw up immediately, no matter whose company you are in.

It took me three months to learn to cope with the pipe, but what I cannot understand is why, during that three months, it didn't occur to me to ask why I was subjecting myself to the torture to begin with.

Of course, once they learn to cope with the pipe, few seem as contented as pipe smokers. Most are convinced that they smoke because they enjoy the pipe. But surely the question is why did they have to work so hard to learn to ‘enjoy' it when they were perfectly happy without it?

The answer is that once we are hooked, we have to find a way to service our addiction. You need to get this very clear in your mind. You didn't get addicted to nicotine because you fell into the habit of smoking. It's the other way around. You had to get into the habit of smoking to service your addiction.

Even the expression ‘giving up' is part of the brainwashing. This phrase implies a genuine and substantial sacrifice. The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from this terrible slavery and achieving marvelous positive gains. We are going to start to remove this brainwashing now. From this point on, no longer will we refer to ‘giving up', but to stopping, quitting or the most accurate descriptor of all: ESCAPING!

What tempts us to smoke in the first place is the influence of people already smoking, whether they are the older kids at school, movie stars or our own family. We assume that smokers are getting some tremendous pleasure from smoking and fear that we are missing out on it. We work so hard to become hooked, yet no smoker ever finds out what it is they were missing. Every time we see another smoker we are reassured that there must be something to smoking, otherwise other people wouldn't be doing it.

Because he's brainwashed into believing he has made a genuine sacrifice when he quits, the cigarette continues to dominate the ex-smoker who quits using willpower. This is why people quitting using willpower are often so miserable.

As a child in the 1940s I remember listening to the Paul Temple detective series, which was a very popular program on BBC radio. One episode dealt with marijuana. Some evildoers were selling cigarettes that contained pot. There were no harmful effects. People merely became addicted and had to go on buying the cigarettes. I was about seven years old when this
episode aired. It was the first I had heard of drug addiction and the concept filled me with horror. Even to this day I would not dare take one puff of a joint. How ironic that I should end up addicted to the world's most addictive drug—nicotine. If only Paul Temple had warned me about the tobacco in that cigarette instead of the marijuana! How ironic too that at this time (the immediate post-WWII period) tobacco companies were already aware of the addictiveness of nicotine and were experimenting with ways to increase nicotine yields.

It is incredible to me that we continue to allow tobacco companies to spend billions of dollars persuading healthy teenagers to smoke and that the government itself profits from smokers to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

We are about to remove the brainwashing. It is not the non-smoker who is being deprived but the smoker who is surrendering a lifetime of:

• HEALTH
  
• ENERGY
  
• WEALTH
  
• PEACE OF MIND
  
• CONFIDENCE
  
• COURAGE
  
• SELF-RESPECT
  
• HAPPINESS
  
• FREEDOM
  

And what does he gain from making these enormous sacrifices?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The only thing the cigarette does is remove the aggravation caused by the previous cigarette, so that the smoker, for a moment, feels like a non-smoker.
By lighting up, he temporarily relieves the very slight feeling of emptiness and enjoys the state of relaxation and peace that non-smokers enjoy all their lives. But immediately after putting the cigarette out, the nicotine begins to leave the bloodstream and the slightly empty feeling returns. So the smoker has to light up again, and again and again.