Free Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr

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 replacethem 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 repeatedthousands 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