Allen Carr

Allen Carr, founder of the Easyway to Stop Smoking method, was born in 1934 in London, England.

Like many men of his generation, he started smoking as a young man doing his National Service. In all he smoked for 33 years and in the latter years he smoked between 60 and 100 cigarettes a day.

In July 1983 after countless miserable attempts to quit smoking, he discovered what every smoker on the planet is looking for: an easy way to stop smoking. In October 1983 he resigned from his position as Chief Financial Officer of a major toy company to work full-time with smokers.

He ran his first quit smoking seminars from the front room of his house in Raynes Park, near Wimbledon, just outside London. Word of the success of his method spread quickly and before long, Carr was asked to put the seminar into book form. That book - The Easy Way to Stop Smoking - first published in 1985, has now sold over 10,000,000 copies and has been a #1 bestseller in nine different countries. In 2001 it was voted by customers of Amazon in the UK as one of the fifty most influential books of the 20th century.

During that time, his seminar business continued to thrive and today there are 115 Easyway centres in 40 countries. In a clinical evaluation published in the November 2006 issue of the medical journal Addictive Behaviours, Easyway seminars were calculated to have a 12-month success rate of 53.3%. This is especially impressive given the short duration (the seminar takes just six hours including time for five smoke breaks, compared to the 11-12 weeks for most therapies) of the treatment. To put this into context, the 12-month success rate for Nicotine Replacement Therapy is around 10%. Hypnosis, acupuncture and laser therapy show no improvement over cold turkey (around 5%).

After failing to battle my own nicotine addiction using willpower, patches, gum, pills, hypnosis, aupuncture and laser therapy, I was shocked and thrilled to quit smoking very easily at an Allen Carr seminar in London in 2001. Because I had been a smoker my whole adult life, I had never really thought much about how the cigarette had come to control my life. From the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, my life was one continuous attempt to try to create an excuse to go and smoke a cigarette. It dictated what I did, where I went, who I saw, who I avoided seeing, where I ate, where I drank, where I worked, where I went on vacation.

As a non-smoker for the first time I was able to go places, see people and do things that as a smoker, I just couldn't. The sense of freedom was fantastic, as was the boost of energy I felt after years of lethargy as a smoker. My self-esteem and self-confidence came flooding back and I even lost weight. I felt that Allen's Easyway method had given me my life back and this allowed me, for the first time, to begin to become the person, the father and husband I had always wanted to be. Tremendously grateful, I got back in touch with Easyway and pestered them into training me to conduct Easyway seminars.

It was a thrill to be selected to train as an Allen Carr facilitator but just as big a thrill was getting to know Allen himself. I admired Allen because of what he had done for me and my family (my wife quit by reading the book and I quit at a seminar) and was very happy once I met him to find that he was an open, honest, generous man, completely untouched by his fame and success. Passionate about the smoking issue and tremendously knowledgeable, Allen was a formidable and tireless campaigner for helping smokers. He was a 'man on a mission' personified.

Over the years, Carr became increasingly frustrated by what he perceived as the tobacco control establishment's lack of support for his programme. He was concerned with helping smokers, not with the politics and bureaucracy of the establishment, most of whom, Carr noted, had never smoked or had ever helped a single smoker to quit. As the British government threw more and more money at relatively ineffective programmes, while going out of their way to ignore Easyway, Carr's frustration grew.

In his final book, Scandal, he spoke eloquently of this situation. In it he described the many times he had tried to approach the establishment, only to be rebuffed. Carr felt that drugs companies, whose agenda he believed was to sell more patches and pills, influenced too much of the tobacco control agenda. In particular he fell out with Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), whom he criticised for championing drug company products rather than effective treatments.

In essence, he felt that the establishment was going about the whole smoking problem the wrong way. Rather than tell people that quitting is difficult and that physical withdrawal is brutal, Carr advocated a simple, drug-free, common sense approach which was demonstrably more effective and cheaper to implement. The establishment never forgave him. Fortuntely the millions of people who became happy non-smokers by using his unique approach did.

In July 2006 Allen was diagnosed with squamous cell lung cancer. Carr was typically upbeat. Lung cancer ran in his family, he said. "If I hadn't quit smoking, I'd have been dead twenty years ago." And look at what he achieved in that twenty years: It is estimated that his books and seminars helped 10m smokers quit. Given that smoking is said to kill 1 in 2 smokers, by any calculation Carr's contribution to society has been immense.

It is not possible to tell whether his cancer was caused by his own heavy smoking prior to 1983 or by the years spent in smokey seminar rooms working to help others. Either way, Carr was philosophical. "Since I smoked my final cigarette 23 years ago, I've been the happiest man in the world" he said.

Allen Carr died in November 2006, surrounded by his loving family. In death he perhaps received the public recognition that he had not enjoyed during his life. That his obituary appeared in the Times, the Economist, Forbes, the British Medical Journal and many other fine publications was a measure of the degree of public acceptance. The thousands of letters and emails received at Easyway offices around the world and at the Easyway website (http://www.allencarr.com/) are a testament to the affection, respect and gratitude of the many people he helped.

Allen Carr was a great man. He was a wonderful friend, colleague and mentor. It was a privilege to have known him and his memory serves to inspire all Easyway facilitators in their daily work with smokers.

Introduction

Welcome to The Easyway to Stop Smoking blog.

My name is Damian O'Hara and I head up Allen Carr's Easyway organisation in the US and Canada. I am a former smoker who, after countless miserable attempts to quit using just about every method under the sun, eventually did so easily and enjoyably at an Allen Carr's Easyway seminar in 2001. Today I have the privilege of helping other smokers achieve this wonderful change in their lives.

I decided to write this blog for a couple of reasons: firstly, there is a real lack of good quality information for smokers wanting to quit. Most of the information out there is just a re-hash of the cliches that the health establishment keep trotting out - that quitting is difficult (harder to quit than heroin, they keep telling us), that withdrawal from nicotine is brutal and that life as a non-smoker will never be as enjoyable. This is absolute garbage and I wanted to begin to put another, more productive view forward.

Secondly, most of the information comes from people within the medical community who themselves have never smoked. Whilst I have the greatest respect for doctors, I think it's easier to learn from someone who has been there than from someone who hasn't.

Thirdly, most of the information focuses on how bad smoking is for you, but it doesn't tell you how to quit. This is worse than useless. Smokers know that smoking is bad for them, but that's not why they smoke. The challenge is not to understand why we shouldn't smoke (we've known that for years and if that knowledge was enough to cure us, we would already be non-smokers); it's to understand why we do smoke and to deal with those reasons.

Fourthly, seeing as tobacco control is now fairly high up on the political radar these days, I wanted a forum within which we could comment on matters regarding tobacco control, tobacco companies, government and smokers.

Finally, I want people to know that there is a viable alternative to white-knuckling your way through yet another miserable quit. That there is a simple, cheap, drug-free way to stop smoking that has been around for 25 years and has helped millions of smokers just like you to quit easily.

Our objective is to inform, inspire, educate and entertain. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy writing it...