Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [40]
The fear of contracting lung cancer scared me but didn’t make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. You either got away with it or you didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t have to walk through the minefield in the first place. I felt that I knew the risks and that it was my own business and nobody else’s. If a non-smoker ever tried to make me aware of those risks I would defend my rights vigorously, using the evasive tactics all addicts adopt to attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
‘You have to die of something’
Of course you do, but is that a logical reason for deliberately shortening your life?
‘Quality of life is more important than longevity’
Exactly, but surely you are not suggesting that the quality of life of an alcoholic or heroin addict is better than that of someone that isn’t addicted to alcohol or heroin? Do you really believe that a smoker’s quality of life is better than a non-smoker’s? Surely the smoker loses on both counts—his life is both shorter and more miserable.
‘My lungs probably suffer more damage from car exhaust fumes than from smoking’
Even if that were true (it isn’t), is that a logical reason for punishing your lungs further? Can you possibly conceive of anyone being stupid enough to actually put their mouth over a tailpipe and deliberately inhale those fumes into their lungs? And pay for the privilege?
THAT’S WHAT SMOKERS EFFECTIVELY DO!
Think of that next time you watch a smoker inhale good and deep on one of those ‘precious’ cigarettes!
I can understand why the congestion and the risks of contracting lung cancer didn’t help me quit. I could cope with the former and close my mind to the latter. As you are already aware, my method is not to frighten you into quitting, but the complete opposite—to make you realize just how more enjoyable your life will be when you have escaped.
However, I do believe that if I could have seen what was happening inside my body, this would have helped me to quit. Now I’m not referring to the shock technique of showing the smoker’s lung next to that of a non-smoker (I figured that both subjects were pretty dead). Anyway, it was obvious to me from my nicotine stained teeth and fingers that my lungs were unlikely to be a pretty sight. Provided they kept functioning, they were less of an embarrassment than my teeth, breath and fingers—at least no-one could see or smell my lungs.
What I am referring to is the progressive clogging up of our arteries and veins and the gradual deterioration of every muscle and organ caused by depriving them of oxygen and other nutrients. Even worse is that we replace these nutrients with poison and deadly compounds such as carbon monoxide.
Like the majority of motorists, I don’t like the thought of dirty oil or a dirty oil filter in my car engine. Could you imagine buying a brand new Cadillac and never changing the oil or the oil filter? Or even worse, deliberately adding impurities that you know will ruin the engine? That is precisely what we do to our bodies when we become smokers.
Until very recently, the tobacco industry denied that nicotine is addictive (to this day the word ‘addictive’ does not appear on US cigarette pack health warnings) or that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema etc. The industry and its apologists hide behind an argument based on something called etiology. Their argument goes something like this: because we know that many things (possibly thousands) might contribute to the formation of cancer cells, it is impossible to blame one thing (i.e. the cigarette), so long as even one of these other so-called confounding factors is also present. You can never be certain, they argue, which caused the cancer. Using this as a model, it is impossible to prove that banging your head against a brick wall causes headaches, so long as another co-factor (listening to Swiss yodeling music, for example) is present.