Free Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr Page A

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 ignorethe 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 placeit 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