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Allen Carr: My Experience with Smoking
Excerpts from: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Selected with an introduction by Ellopos
21 Pages
Page 5
Society frequently refers to the smoking habit and in this book, for convenience, I also refer to the 'habit'. However, be constantly aware that smoking is not habit, on the contrary it is no more nor less than DRUG ADDICTION!
Through a process of natural selection over thousand of years, our minds and bodies have developed techniques for distinguishing between food and poison and fail- safe methods for ejecting the latter. All human beings are averse to the smell and taste of tobacco until they become hooked. If you blow diluted tobacco into the face of any animal or child before it becomes hooked, it will cough and splutter.
A smoker will smoke old rope rather than abstain, and it doesn't matter if you switch to roll - ups, mentholated cigarettes, cigars or a pipe; to begin with they taste awful but if you persevere you will learn to like them. Smokers will even try to keep smoking during colds, flu, sore throats, bronchitis and emphysema. Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. If it did, no one would smoke more than one cigarette. There are even thousands of ex-smokers hooked on that filthy nicotine chewing gum that doctors prescribe, and many of them are still smoking.
Jaspers, Truth is in communication * Kierkegaard, My work as an author * Emerson, Reading and writing as self-knowledge * Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as moral activities * Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society * Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face * Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous man