Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [25]
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 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 ignore the 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 place it 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?