This link takes you to Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking website where you can get global information about books, DVD's, CD's, and even clinics near you for support to Stop Smoking. (There is also info on other addictions such as drinking or over-eating addictions. Kia Kaha!

I started smoking when I was sixteen. I had already left school for a year, I had a 'steady' boyfriend and all my friends smoked, my boyfriend smoked, his friends smoked, my parents smoked; in fact it seemed like everyone around me had fags hanging out their mouths except me. So it wasn't that I especially needed to smoke or even that anybody pressured me to smoke, it was just that I felt like such an idiot back then, not smoking.

I was addicted from the first cigarette.

The book, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking is not the flashiest written book by a long shot. Its not even overlong. In quite simple terms Allen Carr discusses smoking as an addiction, how this particular addiction works to keep the smoker under control so that they keep on smoking, and then by following Allen Carr's instructions, how the smoker can stop smoking successfully.

Allen Carr himself was a smoker, smoking for over thirty years and smoking his way through up to one hundred cigarettes a day, an amount which even I can self-righteously find incredible, but when, as a smoker, you read his story and his instructions for stopping smoking and know that if he can do it you can do it too, the whole idea becomes at least credible to you. This is not some posh doctor pontificating from some high-up pedestal, telling you, the smoker, how bad you should feel about yourself. This is another human being just like you, who has fought the same demons that you are now girding yourself to fight and reaching out a hand to show you how. That's part of why the book works.

Smokers are not actually idiots, (well maybe some are, but most aren't). They all know, even if they won't admit it, that smoking is expensive and unhealthy. Most wish they had never started. Smoking is a drug addiction just like alcohol addiction or heroin addiction. Being addicted means that a substance is controlling you and your behaviour. It means that no matter how you run your budget the biggest priority of a smoker is always making sure that there is enough money to run the addiction, even at the expense of your family and the people you love. In this respect a smoking addiction is no different from any other addiction. It still amazes me how much more money I have to spend on things that I should have been buying all along. Even on a low income and still running a family, I am feeling so much richer now.

Actually it still amazes me that I am not still smoking too, and the fact that I am not smoking is down to this book by Allen Carr.

"The object of the book" wrote Carr, "is to get you into the frame of mind in which, instead of the normal method of stopping whereby you start off with the feeling that you are climbing Mount Everest and spend the next few days craving a cigarette and envying other smokers, you start off right away with a feeling of elation, as if you had been cured of a terrible disease."

"If you follow my instructions, you will be happy to be a non-smoker for the rest of your life" reads the blurb on the back of my copy of the book. It's true too. I have been a non-smoker after reading this book, (I actually read it twice), since the 2nd of February this year (2007) and I do not feel 'deprived". He does indeed offer a unique method without scare tactics which focuses on removing the psychological "need" to smoke.

Most support structures around now, (government-run or otherwise), that exist to encourage people to not smoke any more focus on supporting a smoker, (just like in any other addiction), to "give up" the terrible vice. They will even give out, or subsidise the drug in another form such as nicotine patches or gum. This is why they have a low success rate, argues Allen Carr's book, a smoker "giving up smoking" in this manner only ends up feeling "deprived"; moreover the unwitting smoker who may not only be failing to 'give up' smoking is also in danger of becoming addicted to wearing a nicotine patch or chewing on the nicotine gum while working as well.

All this may well raise some interesting thoughts about the politics of governments and corporates and the way in which pharmaceutical companies are gradually wresting the nicotine industry from the tobacco companies in Western countries at least. Allen Carr touches on these ideas in this book as well and on his website, (I will add his website link onto Links on the home page), there is a free download of his unpublished book Scandal in which he expands on these ideas.

Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking is now an international bestseller and has been published in over 20 different languages. His second book, The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently, and DVD, audio and CD-ROM versions of his method are also available.