A smoker's way to stop smoking...

We are often asked: "What makes Allen Carr's Easyway so different to other quit smoking methods?" The answer: it's a smoker's way to stop smoking. Take a look and if you like it, spread the word...

A request for honesty from researchers...

Today a number of news outlets report on a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin which concludes that the most effective way to quit smoking is a combination of the nicotine patch and the nicotine lozenge, but there are many questions raised by the research.

Firstly, the research only covered methods involving drugs (most of them including the drug smokers are actually trying to stop). So methods like Allen Carr's Easyway - which has a success rate 8-10 times higher than NRT - were not included.

Secondly, the study does not provide smokers with the actual success rates for the products tested, instead they compare them in relation to each other. So, for example, we know that using a combination of the nicotine patch and lozenge increases a smoker's chance of being smoke-free after six months by over 200% over placebo.

Sounds impressive, right? But is it really?

The first question is a simple one: a 200% increase from what to what? From 1% to 3%? From 10% to 30%? This is what smokers really want to know, but this information is nowhere to be found.

According to Clive Bates, Director of ASH the UK's leading tobacco control charity and an enthusiastic supporter of NRT the six month success rates are "3-6%". Hardly success to shout from the rooftops is it?

And how many of those who are smoke-free at six months end up addicted to the patch or the lozenge, and how many of these nicotine addicts ultimately go back to smoking?

For simple, clear success rate data for Allen Carr's Easyway and just about every other method out there, please visit us at http://www.theeasywaytostopsmoking.com/AboutUs/Success/tabid/68/Default.aspx

A simple question...

If e-cigarettes are as safe as their makers claim, why are they resisting FDA oversight? If they have nothing to hide then the FDA will declare them safe and allow them to be sold.

I would have thought they would welcome the FDA's interest and co-operate in every way with them, not sue to challenge their authority.

Personally, I remain deeply suspicious of anyone selling a product containing an addictive drug while claiming it doesn't warrant federal oversight. It seems to me that e-cigarette companies are guilty of behaving like the tobacco companies they are so clearly trying to replace.

To get nicotine - in all its forms - out of your life, learn more about Allen Carr's easyway by visiting us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

More light relief...

This won't help you quit, but it is pretty funny...

Ayn Rand Centre: Smoking and personal freedom

Today the Ayn Rand Centre for Individual Rights released an article describing the tobacco control community as "a cancer on American liberty". It's ironic really, calling the American Cancer Society a 'cancer'.

The article claims that smoking by-laws, taxes on cigarettes, tobacco advertising bans and lawsuits against Big Tobacco unnecessarily inconvenience smokers and tobacco companies. Smokers should be left to make their own decisions, free of interference, it argues.

So, let's get this right: the Ayn Rand Centre supports smoking everywhere without restriction, no taxes on tobacco, allowing drug dealers to advertise their product without restriction and that tobacco companies ought to be allowed to lie to protect their business and be immune from prosecution for doing so. It sounds like the 1950s and the effect of these policy reversals would be to dramatically increase smoking rates to levels seen back then, undoing 50 years of public health education and initiating a dramatic explosion of the current health crisis at untold financial and human expense.

Actually, I'm a big fan of individual freedom and responsibility myself. But can a child be expected to demonstrate the same degree of maturity and responsibility as an adult? Of course not: just watch an episode of 90210.

The problem here is that over 90% of smokers get hooked in childhood - years before they are able to exert adult thinking and maturity. Tobacco companies know this very well and have been shown to market to teens on a routine basis. This makes sense: when you kill 5,000,000 of your customers every year, you need fresh meat. It is almost impossible to get adults to start smoking, so tobacco companies use cartoon characters, cellphone-shaped packaging and candy-like flavours to promote tobacco to kids.

Is the Ayn Rand Centre really suggesting that this is OK? When you end up supporting drug dealers promoting to children because of 'personal freedom', surely you know something isn't right? Someone needs to point out to them that real adults take real responsibility, including responsibility for their families and their fellow citizens - it's what humans do in civil society. With respect to tobacco, this means protecting easily-misled children from rapacious, amoral tobacco companies looking to make a buck.

We see tens of thousands of smokers every year in our seminars. Over 90% of them started smoking as children and not one of them ever thought they would end up smoking for as long as they have. Kids fall into the nicotine trap very quickly, but it can take them a lifetime to escape.

This is the problem when an idea (personal freedom) becomes a dogma, to be slavishly followed, irrespective of the consequences. Yes, of course personal freedom is important, but it should not trump everybody else's personal freedom. Surely the right to clean air for everyone trumps an individual's right to smoke? Let's not make our children pay the price of Ms. Rand's intellectual masturbation.

It is tobacco companies, not the tobacco control movement who are cancer on American freedom. Every year they steal life from the 450,000 Americans who die from smoking, and liberty from the 8m Americans living with a smoking -related disease or condition.

Yet another happy non-smoker...

As I mentioned in my blog last week, Oct 15th was Colleen Rusholme's first anniversary of quitting. Colleen is part of Toronto's EZ-Rock breakfast team, Humble, Kim, Colleen and Rick.

She sent this lovely email through...

"I carry the words " shame" " hopelessness" and " fear" on a little piece of paper in my wallet. I pull it out sometimes as a reminder of who I used to be and how I felt about myself as a smoker. If I could go back and tell that girl that she could be a happy, non deprived non-smoker, I would. I'm free and forever grateful for this method of quitting. I only planned on quitting ONCE. And that's what I did. THANK-YOU!"

We hope that the large number of smokers who want to quit, but are too scared to try, will be inspired by your story. Thank you Colleen for sharing it...

To quit smoking in Toronto - or anywhere across North America, please visit us at www.theeasywaytostopsmoking.com

Smoking in movies

Watch this excellent and fascinating video from Stanton Glantz's team at Smoke Free Movies.

It's called 120,000 Lives a Year and it's the story of how Big Tobacco uses Hollywood to recruit young smokers.

David vs. Goliath

Yesterday I attended a meeting of municipal smoking cessation workers in Ontario, Canada.

I was struck by two things: firstly, by the dedication, passion, humour and integrity of the attendees, and second, by the laughable mismatch of resources and money between these wonderful people and the tobacco industry.

If these guys had access to 1% of the money the tobacco industry spends on fighting tobacco control legislation, smoking would be a thing of the past.

Make smoking a thing of your past. Make the first move towards quitting smoking by visiting us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Flavoured tobacco products banned

Today the FDA fired its first shot across the bows of the tobacco companies by banning all flavoured tobacco products with the exception of menthol.

Quoting from an 'historic' internal tobacco company memo which plainly states plans to directly target children, Dr. Laurence Deyton of the FDA said that teen smokers are three times more likely than adult smokers to favour flavoured tobacco products.

I wonder whether they'll ban those disgusting tobacco-flavoured cigarettes?!

Whether you are smoking TwistaLime, Strawberry, Vanilla, Winter Mocha Mint or Marlboro Light, you can quit easily using Allen Carr's simple, drug-free Easyway method.

Thought for the day...

What happens to all those cigarette butts that just get tossed onto the sidewalk?

When I was a smoker I didn't give them a second thought, but cigarette butts are easily the world's biggest source of litter with 4,500,000,000,000 (that's 4.5 TRILLION) being discarded annually.

Keep America Beautfiul (www.kab.org) estimates that cigarette butts constitute 34% of all litter (food wrappers came in second place, with around 10%). On a monthly clean-up of a small section of Boynton Beach in Florida, over 5,000 butts are collected daily.

Cigarette butts contain arsenic, acetone, lead, formaldehyde, benzene, ammonia and cadmium. These chemicals seep out on contact with water, making them deadly to marine life. The filters are made of cellulose acetate, which takes decades to biodegrade.

So before you toss your butt away, think about holding onto it and throwing it in a trash can...

Or, even better, quit smoking with the world's most effective stop smoking method - Allen Carr's Easyway. For more information about this simple, drug-free approach to quitting, visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Another happy non-smoker

Today, we received this email from Jenny Evans, who attended one of our live seminars in NYC.

She says: "I never thought I could stop smoking after 45 years. How could I handle life? I didn't even remember what it was like to be a "Non-Smoker". Well, I have been smoke-free for 2 months now using the "EasyWay", and I feel great! This has been the most empowering gift I have ever given myself. I believe if I can do this.....anyone can!!!!!! I really mean that."

Thank you Jenny for sharing this inspirational story.

To find out how Jenny did it, and how you can too, please visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Tobacco is tobacco is tobacco...

In his blog at the right-wing, libertarian Cato Institute site Cato@Liberty, David Boaz says that because Philip Morris is not fighting alongside their fellow tobacco companies to overturn new advertising restrictions, we should say that this is not about "Big" Tobacco, but "Medium" Tobacco.

But I think there's a much more interesting observation here: Why aren't Philip Morris fighting along with the rest of the industry? Why are they now accepting the same advertising restrictions that througohut the 1970s and 1980s they fought tooth and nail against? I hate to sound cynical, but if all advertising is banned, no-one will ever be able to take over Philip Morris's No.1 position as market leader. No wonder Philip Morris want this ban just as much as the tobacco-control advocates, albeit for completely different reasons!

Is PM's position altruism or self-interest? You decide.

Plain packaging - the tobacco industry's worst nightmare

While American tobacco companies are going to court to try to avoid putting proper health warnings on cigarettes, there is a much bigger drama being played out in Europe, where tobacco control advocates have proposed the implementation of plain packaging for cigarettes - no camels, no colour, no chevrons, no fancy typrefaces, nothing. Just plain grey packaging with the name of the brand in simple black text.

The tobacco industry is a lot more worried about plain packaging than they are about health warnings. They know that older smokers ignore the health warnings and that younger smokers and experimenters feel that they don't apply - "I'll quit years before that happens" they tell themselves...

On the other hand, their branding, logo and typeface is really all they have left to try to appeal to customers. That's why the tobacco industry spends so much money developing sexy packaging...hot pink, cellphone shaped packs. Good thing they aren't trying to appeal to kids!

To quit smoking easily and enjoyably visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Tobacco companies and freedom of expression

I was reading Dave Melson's blog entry which described his concerns over limits to free expression in the light of the current court case in which tobacco companies are attempting to have loosened recently imposed advertising and packaging restrictions.

I share his concerns, but feel this might be a special case...

This was Allen Carr north America's response...

"I totally understand the almost visceral reaction to any potential threat to freedom of expression, but with their guiding principles of fairness and equality, if the Founding Fathers had seen the way that First Amendment rights had been so egregiously abused by certain people, institutions, industries and companies, they wouldn't have hesitated for a second to legislate against them.

The tobacco industry is surely one such case: Smoking has a truly catastrophic human, financial and societal cost. An estimated 400,000 Americans die from smoking-related diseases every year (part of the nearly 6m worldwide) to say nothing of the 8m Americans living with smoking-related health problems, the millions of loved ones left behind or the estimated $100bn spent every year on caring for smokers.

The links between smoking and cancer and heart disease were established in the early 'sixties. For FORTY YEARS the tobacco industry publicly and energetically denied, while privately acknowledging, these and hundreds of other scientific findings. Big Tobacco have used their First Amendment rights to deceive, distort, deny and lie with stunning effect.

We have a right to bear arms, but if you are convicted of a gun crime, then you are likely going to be prohibited from owning a gun in the future. I think most people would agree that this makes sense.

Likewise, if someone has been found to continually and cynically use their First Amendment rights over a forty-year period to promote an addictive product they know to cause death and disease, why wouldn't it be equally correct that their right to free expression be limited and subject to oversight in the specific areas they have been found guilty of lying in?

Don't get me wrong, this is not a sanction I would take lightly, but I feel that special cases sometimes need extraordinary actions, and in this case I sense the punishment very much fits the crime, so to speak.

Incidentally, all this bill really does is to bring the US a little closer to where every other developed nation is on tobacco control already. The Australians, Canadian and Europeans have had these warnings and this type of advertising restrictions for years.

By the tobacco industry's deeds shall ye know them. Sometimes you know the right side of an argument just by seeing who is on the other side..."

Quit smoking success rates: Nicotine patch

Every day we get visitors to our site asking about the success rate for other quit smoking methods, so today I would like to focus on one of the most popular (and least effective!) quit smoking aids: the nicotine patch.

The nicotine patch is an adhesive patch that releases nicotine into the bloodstream. It is marketed as a quit smoking aid, and for years manufacturers have claimed that the patch "double your chances of quitting" (this claim appears on the US Surgeon General's office, Health Canada, Cancer Society and Heart Assocation websites) but double it from what to what? From 50% to 100% or from 1% to 2%?

Believe it or not, it is actually much harder than you think to find out even something this straightforward. The reason for this is that researchers rarely quote an actual success rate. Instead they compare the success of a treatment to placebo or to no treatment and quote the difference as an Odds Ratio (OR). So if a treatment is twice as effective as placebo, it has an OR of 2. If it's half as effective the OR would be 0.5.

There have been hundreds of studies looking into the effectiveness of the nicotine patch. Cochrane's Review, an independent body examining evidence-based treatments, identified 111 trials covering over 40,000 smokers and concluded that the nicotine patch has an OR of 1.66 vs. placebo.

So, if you slap a nicotine patch on, then you have a 66% better chance of quitting than if you wore a patch with no nicotine. This is interesting to me. If nicotine replacement really worked, you would expect it to be two, three or even five times higher than placebo or using nothing at all.

Clive Bates, Director of Action on Smoking and Health in the UK and one of the most vocal supporters of nicotine replacement therapy sheds some light on this issue. In a post on a discussion thread in April 2002, Mr. Bates wrote: "The unaided quit rate is about 3% success per attempt. NRT doubles that to 6%."

So, according to one of its biggest supporters, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has a success rate of 6% or, put another way, a 94% failure rate.

Allen Carr was dismissive of NRT from the beginning. He said "Telling a nicotine addict to stop using nicotine by taking nicotine is a bit like telling an alcoholic to drink beer instead of wine."

Ellen DeGeneres said it best: "The nicotine patch only works when you put one over each eye so you can't find your cigarettes!"

For a simple, no-BS, drug-free approach to quitting, visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

How Ashton Kutcher quit smoking...

Ashton Kutcher: actor, director, prankster and now...non-smoker!

Listen to Ashton talk about how he quit smoking using Allen Carr's unique Easyway method. You can see him talk about it on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno by clicking here. You will also find testimonials from Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Richard Branson, Ellen DeGeneres, Jason Mraz, Lou Reed, Stewart Copeland and David Blaine.

We want to thank Ashton - and all our other celebrity fans - for going public with this and for spreading the word.

To find out more about this simple, drug-free approach to quitting, please visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

More quit smoking scammers

I recently contacted a company called I Quit Smoking, who claim an 80-90% success rate using laser 'therapy'.

Out of interest I asked what evidence they had to support this astonishing claim - particularly in the light of Cochrane's independent, evidence-based review into acupuncture, auricular and laser therapies, which concluded that "There is no consistent evidence that acupuncture, acupressure, laser therapy or electrostimulation are effective for smoking cessation" and "The review did not find consistent evidence that active acupuncture or related techniques increased the number of people who could successfully quit smoking vs. using placebo or sham acupuncture."

When I asked them to comment on this apparent inconsistency, I didn't hear from them again.

I was also a little suspicious of their testimonials. They quote a testimonial from a Canadian smoker who apparently quit in 2001, despite the company not coming to Canada until 2008. They quote testimonials from Italy and Austria, despite having no operations there. Smells a bit fishy to me!

For a simple, honest, BS-free approach to quitting smoking, please visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Allen Carr's Easyway featured on Forbes.com

Back in July I was interviewed by Kym McNicholas at Forbes for her Personal Best feature.

Here's the link...http://video.forbes.com/fvn/personalbest/why-people-still-smoke-allen-carr-easyway-stop-smoking

I'm so happy that the mainstream media is catching on to Allen Carr's unique Easyway method.

Thanks Kym, for a terrific piece...

To find out more about quitting smoking using this simple, drug-free approach, please visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

More stupidity from Philly

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer Patrick McNally laments the treatment of smokers at Citizens Bank Field where the Phillies ply their trade.

A former smoker himself he 'sympathizes with the urge to light up even though...it's a dangerous habit."

Mr. McNally says: "Cigarettes are dangerous, but the same could be said of the hot dogs, pretzels, and beer sold in the ballpark. Yet I was able to buy them and walk back to my seat to enjoy my doughy, salty, fatty, alcoholic treats."

Hot dogs and pretzels are hardly health foods, but to compare them to an addictive drug that kills nearly 6,000,000 around the world every year is ridiculous. Smoking isn't a "dangerous habit", it's a drug addiction that kills half of the people that can't stop.

In addition, eating hot dogs and pretzels don't create dangers for other people. There is no second-hand trans-fat is there?

Mr. McNally should realize that it is smoking, not smokers, that is the target here.

If you are one of the 80% of smokers who want to quit, visit us at www.theeasywaytostopsmoking.com

Smoking and stress relief

Today I wanted to take a look at an article about smokers from the Chicago Tribune. I'm happy that the media covers this important topic, but the fact that they just trot out the same illusions about smoking and quitting is a bit depressing...

In particular, the article focuses on smoking as a stress reliever.

Smoker Keith Shannon says that a break-in scuppered his most recent attempt to quit. "After getting hit over the head with a gun, I needed a cigarette." This is presumably based on the well known fact that smoking a cigarette is an excellent cure for being hit over the head with a gun.

"It helps calm my nerves" Mr. Shannon says of the drug that elevates heart rate and blood pressure and causes the release of cortisol (the stress hormone) and adrenaline (the 'fight or flight' chemical). Does that sound like 'calming the nerves' to you? Some stress relief! More like a recipe for a heart attack.

Three pack-a-day smoker Deborah Israel says "Cigarettes are just adult pacifiers, you stick 'em in your mouth when you get stressed." Three packs a day is a lot of stress relief isn't it? If the cigarette worked to relieve stress, then why is the chain-smoking Ms. Israel stressed at all? Ironically, she says that quitting smoking would be too expensive as her company plan does not cover quit smoking programs. This is somewhat ironic coming from someone who spends over $7,500 a year on buying smokes.

Smoking to relieve stress is like drinking alcohol to get sober. The problem is that the illusion of smoking and stress relief is a subtle one. When a smoker puts out a cigarette, they go into physical withdrawal from nicotine. This is a barely noticeable feeling, a bit like hunger or very mild anxiety. The longer the smoker goes without smoking, the more pronounced the feeling becomes. When the smoker lights up, this slightly anxious edgy feeling disappears - leading the smoker to think that smoking relieves stress, when in fact withdrawal from the previous cigarette created that additional stress in the first place.

Until smokers can see through that illusion, they will have a desire or perceived need to smoke whenever they are in a stressful situation. They will need to use willpower to overcome that desire. This creates a conflict: part of them wants to smoke, but part wants to quit and it is this mental conflict (not physical withdrawal) that makes quitting challenging for those using willpower.

Allen Carr's Easyway method removes the need for willpower by enabling smokers to change their belief that smoking releives stress. Eliminating this belief eliminates the desire to smoke in stressful situations and with no desire to smoke, it really doesn't take willpower not to.

To find out more about this simple, drug-free approach to quitting, visit us at www.theeasywaytostopsmoking.com