Props to Quitnow.ca

We are very grateful to the folks at www.QuitNow.ca for linking to www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com - they are the first Lung Assocation website in Canada to do so.

As many people know, we are a reluctantly commercial organisation. Allen tried to gift his method to the National Health Service in the UK over twently years ago, but with no success. As a result of us being 'commercial' many of the Cancer Society, Heart & Stroke Foundation and Health Canada sites will not even mention Allen Carr, despite it being the most effective method around (incidentally, this policy doesn't appear to stop them from linking to their pharmaceutical company sponsor's commercial sites!)

Thanks to the Lung Association for their trailblazing!

Interesting new review of the Allen Carr method

This is an excellent, concise review of Allen's most famous book from YouCanStopSmokingNow.net

You can read hundreds more reviews from people who have quit using Allen's simple, drug-free method at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Smoking and depression

The link between smoking and depression is one that has been well-known for decades. But what comes first: the chicken or the egg? Are depressed smokers self-medicating or does smoking cause depression?

A study that logged the complete medical history of 1200 New Zealanders born in 1977 claims to have the answer: Nicotine addicts are over 2.3 times more likely to suffer from depression than non-smokers.

Makes perfect sense to me: having your life dominated by a four-inch stick of dried vegetation that doesn't even get you high is pretty depressing...

Break free from the slavery of smoking with Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking

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...

Great mention of Allen Carr on Lance Armstrong's Livestrong site...

Thanks to Livestrong.com for this great mention of Allen Carr's Easyway.

Anjelica Huston endorses Easyway

Today Anjelica Huston went public with her endorsement of Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking.

She said: “Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking Program achieved for me a thing that I thought was not possible – to give up a thirty year smoking habit literally overnight. It was nothing short of a miracle.”

Anjelica attended a session in Santa Monica California in 2006 and has been happily smoke-free ever since.

We congratulate Anjelica on this wonderful achievement and thank her for taking the trouble to spread the word.

An interesting thought...

Yesterday when I was running a quit smoking seminar, one of the attendees - a rather elderly Greek gentleman - made what I thought was a very interesting point. He said: "If we had to pay for our bodies, in the same way that we have to pay for a car or a house, would we never even think about ruining it by smoking."

He's right: we take so much - including our body and our health - for granted.

Allen Carr once said: "Your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. You only get one, and you've been lucky to have a strong, healthy body. It is a thousand times over your most precious possession. Who could conceive of a more ridiculous behaviour than to spend a fortune for the privilege of administering hourly doses of poison to the vehicle upon which the length, quality and enjoyment of your whole life depends?"

Take control of your life back. Quit smoking today using our online web seminar. To find our more visit 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.

Colleen Rusholme's first anniversary

Congratulations to EZ-Rock's Colleen Rusholme who today celebrates her first anniversary of quitting smoking.

I met Colleen through her colleague, "Humble" Howard Glassman, who quit smoking with us five years ago next month. On air he publicly challenged Colleen - a pretty hardcore smoker - to quit smoking and Colleen, never one to shirk a challenge, accepted. I felt this was a very brave move on Colleen's part, particularly as she was experiencing many of the fears that most smokers have whenever they think about quitting ("The cigarette has always been there for me. I'll be losing my best friend!"), let alone the additional pressure of doing it in front of hundreds of thousands of listeners.

She needn't have worried though. She did brilliantly in the session we had, walked out a happy non-smoker had has stayed one ever since.

This morning, I was a guest on the Humble, Kim, Colleen and Rick breakfast show to celebrate Colleen's anniversary. Howard asked me a question I have never had before in all my years of media appearances: "Why is it so easy to quit?" What a great question! The truth is that when you have the right information, quitting can be very easy.

Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking webcasts, seminars and books provide all smokers with the information they need to quit easily and enjoyably. To find out more, visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Uh-oh: more tobacco company ethics issues

Today, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published a devastating article about the destruction of key documents by British American Tobacco's (BAT) Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Tobacco Canada (ITC).

In it the authors claim that BAT instructed ITC to destroy key documents that could expose the company to liability or embarrassment. ITC, rather stupidly in my view, wrote to BAT listing sixty of these documents, confirming their destruction. Using this list, these sixty documents were subsequently found in BAT's own document archives.

The documents included evidence from internal scientific reviews, as well as 47 original research studies, 35 of which examined the cancer-causing effects of smoking. The documents also describe BAT research on light and mild cigarettes, including the ways in which consumers adapted their smoking behaviour in order to get the same levels of nicotine as if they were smoking full-strength cigarettes. The documents also depict a comprehensive research program on the pharmacology of nicotine and its addictiveness, showing the central role of nicotine in smoking behaviour.

We should bear in mind that in 1992, when these documents were destroyed, tobacco companies were still denying that nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused cancer.

As we say in our seminars: Sometimes you need to ask yourself who your friends are.

See no evil...

Today, a rather self-serving Philip Morris (PM) research report looking at the effectiveness of in-store tobacco display bans was published on the PM-owned website, productdisplayban.com. In it, they conclude that the display ban in Iceland has not had any impact on the number of smokers or the amount they smoke. As a result, they say, the ban should be lifted.

But if such display bans have no effect on cigarette sales, then why does PM continue to fight their introduction with such energy and enthusiasm? And if such bans have no impact, then what's the problem with leaving them in place? Just a thought...

Winter is on the way...

As the leaves begin to turn here in the NorthEast, the smoker's heart begins to sink as they brace themselves for six months of freezing to death in order to do a drug that doesn't even get them high.

Last winter I flew into Saskatoon to run some sessions and saw something interesting at the airport. As you are probably aware, it gets pretty cold in Saskatoon. This February evening it was -28 degrees Centigrade. Like most people, my big jacket was in my main baggage, so I was waiting for my suitcase at the carousel. Another passenger - clearly a smoker - was doing the same, and getting increasingly agitated as the wait for our luggage continued. In the end he said: "Screw it, I'm outta here." and walked outside in just a T-shirt, to smoke a cigarette.

The terminal at Saskatoon Airport is totally glass-fronted, so the rest of us still at the baggage carousel could see him outside, in -28, trying to light his cigarette. He was shivering so much that he couldn't even light it, and this frustrated him even more. Within a minute or so, he couldn't even feel his hands, but he refused to give up. Eventually, a bundled-up airport employee went outside to ask if he was OK. "I'm fine" he said "I'm just getting a bit of fresh air."

Avoid the indignity of standing outside freezing your nuts off, pretending that you need fresh air when what you really need is to smoke. Quit smoking today with Allen carr's unique Easyway method by visiting us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Another happy non-smoker

We received this email today, from R. Glassman in Toronto:

"4-and-a-half years as a happy non smoker with absolutely no possible reason to ever consider touching a cigarette again. It's that simple and easy. Once I understood that there were no possible benefits to smoking, it wasn't hard for me to never want to smoke. The seminar really worked for me!"

Thank you for taking the trouble to get in touch and very many congratulations on this wonderful achievement.

To learn more about how you can quit smoking using this simple, drug-free approach, visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

When you lit that first cigarette....

When you lit that first cigarette were you really deciding that you'd be a smoker for the rest of your life? Did you think that you'd still be smoking all these years later? If you had known that first cigarette would put you in this situation, would you have smoked it?

The vast majority of smokers have their first cigarettes as children. Under pressure from peers, they want to be one of the cool kids. The first few cigarettes are absolutely disgusting and this is what springs the trap: the young smoker just cannot accept that they could get addicted to something so disgusting that doesn't even get them high. It's this lack of a high that springs the trap. If the cigarette got us high like crack or crystal meth, we would be far more wary. The lack of a high prevents the young smoker from seeing smoking for the drug addiction it is, and so we continue to smoke, secure in the knowledge that we could not get into trouble with a drug that doesn't even get us high. The first time most people realize they have a problem is the first time they try to quit and realize they can't.

Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking has helped millions of smokers to escape from the smoking trap easily and permanently. To find out more visit 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.

American tobacco vs. Canadian law - you decide

Rep. Jim Battle of South Carolina's article published on scnow.com serves as a reminder of how influential the tobacco industry remains at all level of politics.

His article bemoans the impact that the Canadian government's decision to ban flavoured tobacco products, which have been specifically designed to appeal to young people, will have. He says that this will have an effect on South Carolina's revenues as a major tobacco producer and must be stopped.

It is mind-boggling that anyone would place the interests of tobacco companies over public health and in particular, youth smoking. Then again, Mr. Battle is a good friend of Big Tobacco and his work in defence of them has netted campaign contributions from Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Lorillard, US Tobacco and Brown & Williamson.

Rather than propping up an industry that is already spectacularly profitable and that kills nearly half-a-million North Americans every year, perhaps South Carolina's legislators ought to be looking for new opportunities to replace the tobacco industry, which, like many of its' customers is in terminal decline.

Gosh, politics really is a dirty game...

Nicotine Replacement Therapy

Yesterday we received an email from Ann Garner of Pittsburgh, PA. She wrote: "I'm a smoker who has just become pregnant and my doctor keeps recommending that I use the nicotine patch to quit, but I've done some research and I'm not convinced it's going to help me. What should I do?'

Whilst we are reluctant to question the advice of doctors, it's difficult to understand how Ann's baby will benefit from regular doses of an addictive drug, so this is a great question.

Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) was first introduced as a quitting aid in the 1980s. Today, it comes in a variety of forms: nicotine patches, gum, nasal inhalators, lozenges, e-cigarettes, nicotine water, nicotine lollipops - the list is endless.

The idea behind NRT is that the smoking problem has two components; physical addiction to nicotine, and the psychological 'need' to smoke. Nicotine replacement is used to maintain the physical aspect of the addiction while giving the addict the chance to deal with the psychological aspect. Once that is successfully dealt with, then they can address the physical side. The only problem is that this theory is complete nonsense: nicotine addiction is the problem, how can it also be the solution? Would you give an alcoholic alcohol to get off alcohol or crack to a crack addict to help him stop using crack?

According to Clive Turner, Director of Action on Smoking and Health and long-time advocate of NRT, the long-term success rate for NRT products is around 6%. An article on whyquit.org shows that the success rate for second- or third-time NRT users is less than using nothing at all.

By contrast, Allen Carr's simple, drug-free Easyway method delivered via webcasts, books and live seminars has a 12-month success rate of 63.6% for a pack-a-day smoker. This rises to 75.8% for people who are able to take advantage of our support programme.

For a commonsense approach to quitting visit us at www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com