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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 7
From our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded daily with information telling us that cigarettes relax us and give us confidence and courage and that the most precious thing on this earth is a cigarette. You think I exaggerate? Whenever you see a cartoon or film or play in which people are about to be executed or shot, what is their last request? That's right, a cigarette. In every war film the injured man is given a cigarette. There are even plugs on television nowadays depicting a naked couple sharing a cigarette in bed after having sex.
The products themselves, those lovely shining packets that lure you into trying their contents, contain a deadly warning on their sides. What smoker ever reads it, let alone brings himself to face the implications of it? Why is it that we regard glue-sniffing and heroin addiction as such great evils, while the drug that we spend most of our money on and is actually killing us we used to regard a few years ago as a perfectly acceptable social habit? In recent years it has been considered a slightly unsociable habit that may injure our health but is legal and on sale in glossy packets in every newsagent, pub, club, garage and restaurant. The biggest vested interest is our own government. It makes £8,000,000,000 per year out of smokers, and the tobacco companies spend over £100,000,000 per year in promotion alone.
Start looking behind these glossy packets at the filth and poison beneath. Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged - your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst aspect of smoking isn't the injury to your health or pocket, it is the warping of the mind. You search for any plausible excuse to go on 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
