Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [75]
2. The use of NRT products (indeed any substitute) also perpetuates the notion that the smoker is ‘giving something up’—that nicotine does something more than merely remove the symptoms of withdrawal created by the previous dose. This, as I have said repeatedly, leads to a sense of sacrifice, and it is this that triggers feelings of deprivation, misery and vulnerability. This necessitates the use of enormous amounts of willpower, which in turn leads to failure rates in excess of 90% (real life studies of the patch and gum seem to indicate a 12-month success rate of around 7%).
All substitutes have exactly the same effect. I’m now talking about this business of ‘I can’t have a cigarette, so I’ll have ordinary chewing gum, or sweets, or peppermints to help fill the void.’ Although the empty feeling of wanting a cigarette is indistinguishable from hunger for food, one will not satisfy the other. In fact, if anything is designed to make you want a cigarette, it’s stuffing yourself with chewing gum or peppermints.
The launch of Zyban is one of the biggest and most controversial changes to the smoking cessation landscape in recent years. It has been around as an anti-depressant (Wellbutrin) for quite a while, but was repackaged as a cessation aid in the late 1990s.
I quit many years before it was launched, but I have read extensively about Zyban and spoken to hundreds of smokers who have attempted to quit by using it. I have to admit to being fairly bemused by the whole concept of it. In addition to admitting ‘…it is unclear exactly how Zyban works…’ which I find a little alarming, the manufacturer’s website states that Zyban ‘reduces the urge to smoke’. But what is an ‘urge’, and how do you measure it? How can you scientifically measure two different ‘urges’ from two different people? An ‘urge’ isn’t something uniform that you can measure like a sack of potatoes; every single one is different and every person is different. Anyway, why try to ‘reduce the urge to smoke’ when it’s just as easy to remove it altogether?
Think of two Zyban quitters sitting having coffee together. One says, “Wow! That was a huge craving. This Zyban isn’t working.” The other says, “I had one too. But mine was OK, this Zyban is really working!” Might it be possible that these two people had the identical feeling but that due to a million outside factors, they interpreted and processed those feelings differently? Could it be possible that one person has a lower discomfort threshold?
Isn’t this all really saying that the desire to smoke is mental, and that we can use the power of the mind to reduce or even eliminate the desire to smoke? This is the EASYWAY—to remove the desire to smoke. Why do we need a drug to help us do this? Why not just use an open mind and facts? Why not permanently remove our desire at a cognitive level, rather than merely temporarily suppressing it? If we are not confronting and dealing with our desire to smoke, but merely using a drug to suppress it, what happens when you stop taking the medication? Does the desire to smoke return?
Interestingly, both Zyban and NRT manufacturers advocate fairly intensive counseling as a critical element of their respective programs (in fact, it is difficult to find published success rates for these products without the counseling element, which makes it difficult to evaluate their true efficacy).
For me, there is something counter-intuitive about treating drug addiction with drugs (particularly the drug you are trying to kick). Zyban only began to make sense to me after a conversation I had with a doctor from Vancouver who attended a seminar. He said that he prescribed Zyban to Willpower