I’ve noticed that on all the Champix blogs, where people are describing the suffering they are going through on that horrible ‘medication’, some bright spark will always pop up explaining that you should expect it to be difficult and traumatic, for after all, as we all know - don’t we? - nicotine is ‘the most addictive substance known to science’! The most addictive drug in the world, so of course this is withdrawal!

What rubbish. The experiences are real enough, but they are nothing to do with nicotine at all. If they were - if that were the inevitable physical result of nicotine being abruptly withdrawn - then a). it would happen to every smoker who ever quit by preference - which it doesn’t, as the U.S. Surgeon-General has already pointed out. Most ex-smokers in the world actually quit by themselves, and if there was any link with suicide attempts it would be obvious by now. It would be a routine observation, resulting in conversations like this:

“Did you hear? Ernie’s quit smoking!”

“Rather ‘im than me! That’ll be another funeral then.”

“You think?”

“Oh, aye - just cast your mind back over the years, all those people you know who quit smoking one week, then they’re found hanging from the rafters the next…”

That would be a laughable suggestion, Pfizer, if that attempt to muddy the waters were not such cruel and self-serving dishonesty which will certainly lead to more suicides…

…and b). smokers who quit with hypnotherapy would still feel like that too, since that is immediate cessation. In reality they feel perfectly normal: no withdrawal symptoms, no cravings, no mood swings, no over-eating and no weight-gain either.

A Serious Challenge for the Scientists

There is a simple way to test this, but you can bet your life that GlaxoSmithKline are never going to run this clinical trial! Here is the experiment to prove nicotine is not an addictive substance:

Take any number of non-smokers (with full consent of course). Apply nicotine patches daily to those people, for as long as you would expect any smoker to develop a habit if you were giving them cigarettes. Get them to keep a diary of how they feel from one day to the next, and see if they can perceive any benefit from nicotine at all. Then one day, tell them the trial is over. Watch for any signs of suffering.

In order to get the most accurate impression of what nicotine itself actually does, without any pre-conceived notions in their minds (expectation), it is important that the volunteers are not told this is nicotine, and are not ex-smokers who might recognise the presence of nicotine. It is also important that they do not have to apply the patch themselves, nor do they know how long the trial will be. They should not be told what to expect, just asked for their genuine observations, if any.

N.B.: It is vital that the N.R.T. mode is PATCHES, not gum or lozenges. This is because smoking, sucking and chewing can all develop a compulsive-habitual element because they are physical activities that can become habitual through repetition, whereas patch-wearing is not an activity. So there is no behaviour, there is only the nicotine itself. Even the application of the patch in the morning cannot become habitual behaviour (like the impulse to put the kettle on in the morning, because that is what you do every morning), because someone else is doing it for them.

So we are down to nicotine itself. I predict the following outcomes: a). the subject will not enjoy the effect of nicotine in any way, although they may become accustomed to it. Conversely, they may react against it with something like an allergic reaction, b). they will be unable to describe any useful benefit from nicotine, and c). they will be quite happy to stop, and it will prove literally impossible to create a “nicotine addict” that way. This will prove once and for all that nicotine is not an addictive drug - nor is it medicinal, therapeutic or even a recreational drug. It is just a poison - one of many poisons in the smoke - and the wrong explanation for the compulsive smoking habit.

The key point here is that smokers’ cravings are not withdrawal symptoms, and are not connected to nicotine in any way. We get lots of cravings, they are not all about tobacco. They are impulses produced by the brain but routed through the body, so they are experienced as if they were a bodily need, or a desire. In reality it is a prompt, and what the impulse from the Subconscious mind is prompting the smoker to do is pick up a cigarette and light it.

If the smoker does that, the feeling disappears. Instantly. Notice that the smoker does not have to smoke the cigarette and get all the nicotine out of it for that impulse to go away, it vanishes the moment they light up. If they do not respond by lighting up, the Subconscious sends another, more insistent signal - assuming the first one went unnoticed - and these prompts will become more frequent and more insistent until the smoker finally responds. This can result in real, physical agitation and mental distress, with the smoker often convinced by the feelings that the ‘need’ has become desperate. Add to that the commonly-held belief that this agitation is the result of a drug addiction, and you have the seemingly helpless predicament of the modern habitual smoker.

In hypnotherapy we shut the craving signals down easily, and get rid of the false ‘addiction’ belief. Hey presto, one non-smoker. Yes, I know it sounds too easy: everything we do in hypnotherapy sounds too easy because hypnotherapy doesn’t involve any effort. Everything the Subconscious mind does is without apparent effort - which is interesting, because we are certainly aware of making conscious efforts. Like the conscious effort (willpower) to ignore craving signals sent by the Subconscious via the body. Guess which has the most clout, conscious or Subconscious? That’s right - hence the capital S.

Wouldn’t this Test make a great T.V. Documentary?

Anyone out there an independent documentary-maker? Radio or TV, doesn’t matter. Want to make a fascinating programme that would be easy and cheap to make, which would interest millions of smokers in every country of the world where they have both tobacco and TV, proving to all those smokers once and for all that they are not drug addicts at all? Not making wild claims - proving it! I’ve already been on TV with this, but that was just a live breakfast show where you get three minutes to talk about it before they move to the weather - you can’t prove much with that kind of slot. Although I did succeed easily with the challenge they set me to eliminate a smoking habit in a member of their staff. That wasn’t a stage trick by the way, it was a proper two-hour hypnotherapy session (see my blogpost from 28th March 2008 entitled Channel M Television).

No More Mr Nice Guy/Therapist!

For too long, people working in the field of alternative therapy have been inclined to hide their light under a bushel, not challenging the medical profession because they feel intimidated by their power and influence. As a direct result of that reticence, people are dying in their millions all over the world from things that we know we can fix, but don’t like to say so - either because the powers that be (currently) have made it illegal for us to claim we can fix, or even treat those things - or because we are afraid of stepping on the toes of influential people, which could provoke vicious regulation that would destroy our practices. We even get warned against ‘making waves’ from our own professional associations, who may believe sincerely that such humble kowtowing is wise and proper, or even more professional!

Oh, really? Fellow alternative practitioners the world over, I refer you to the most highly-regarded profession in the world for many fine examples of boldly speaking out: the medics! Look at medical history - they have never shied away from calling a spade a spade, and going at it hammer and tongs in their periodicals when matters need fiercely debating. And they scarcely miss an opportunity to pour scorn on alternative healthcare - or to damn it with such faint praise that they might just as well - referring to “evidence” they have concocted themselves! And they call that “de-bunking”!

Let Us Respond In Kind

I have absolute confidence in the true value and future promise of the work I do, and I am not going to stand by meekly and listen to anyone tell the public it is “unproven”. I know for sure that the nicotine addiction theory is completely wrong, and I’m going to prove it to the world if it takes me the rest of my life. Of course I will be accused of self-interest or self-promotion and dismissed as a crank by some. I may even be the object of scorn and derision, or worse. I may never live to see the general acceptance of the truth of these matters.

I don’t care, because this is not about me.  If you know - for sure - that a misunderstanding is causing waste, suffering and death quite unnecessarily, and on a truly massive scale, then you have to get rid of the misunderstanding. It is not self-promotion, it is not simply mischief or trouble-making. I am not alone in understanding these facts, and I don’t really want to stand alone.  But no-one else was saying anything, were they - so what do you do? Stand by and watch yet more NRT posters going up at New Year… a year that will see another 120,000 innocent people killed by the nicotine myth?

That’s just in the U.K., by the way - it’s about five million worldwide. Every year, folks. That’s like a holocaust, every single year.  After the Second World, everyone was very quick to accuse the German people of standing by and doing nothing while Hitler’s henchmen did that just one time, and it is very easy to make that accusation, isn’t it. So all of you people out there who like to think you wouldn’t have stood for that - out of common decency and humanity - just reflect on this for a moment:

There will be people out there who genuinely believe I am wrong. It is part of my challenge to explain the facts to them, or invite them to look at the evidence and please just consider the possibility there has been a catastrophic mistake. I have nothing against those people unless they refuse to look at the evidence. But I know that there are many people out there - all over the world, in all walks of life - who recognise the truth of what I am saying and are quite happy for me to stick my head above the parapet and making a lot of noise about it, because they think I’m quite right and somebody really should say something… but so far, they haven’t really got around to joining in. Standing up and being counted. Some have, and I thank them very much for having the courage of their convictions. The many that haven’t - yet - I have nothing against them either, as people, because I understand it. We’re all busy, we have stuff to do. It’s like when the latest appeal envelope plops on the mat, and you glance at the photo of someone who is really in a desperate plight, and you think “Oh yes that’s terrible, that poor soul - but right now I’m late for the school run”, and sure, we’ve all done that, it doesn’t make us bad people.

But if you know - or even suspect - that a misunderstanding is causing a holocaust every year and that situation could be changed dramatically just by the effective exchange of verifiable information - in this, the Information Age - and you choose to do nothing with that information… or nothing much… what does that make you?

The Experiment That Would Prove The Case

This isn’t the only way to prove it of course - I prove it by logical argument alone in the book - but it would be a great way to demonstrate it provided we had the consent of the participants. It stands to reason that if nicotine truly were an addictive substance - a claim which is the entire basis of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning - you would easily be able to create any number of nicotine addicts by the method I have described above - indeed, it would be the inevitable result of that experiment. In practice, I confidently predict that you couldn’t even create one - and that’s because nicotine isn’t an addictive drug. In fact it’s not a drug at all. It’s somewhere between a medical red herring and a con, and this experiment would establish that undeniably, provided it’s done properly.

I have laid down the criteria: if nicotine has any physically addictive properties at all, participants would be feeling the ‘withdrawal’ at the end - suffering exactly like smokers do, in fact, when they try to quit their compulsive smoking habit through conscious efforts to abstain. If all suggestion, habitual behaviour and expectation is eliminated as I have described - and it is an honest, objective experiment, rather than the kind of rigged pantomime that gave us Prozac - then that would be the end of the nicotine myth, right there. And the end of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning.

So that’s my challenge to the medical authorities: do the hard science, and don’t try to pretend that you’ve already done it - because the Big Pharma trick of getting medications passed on very short-term results alone has been rumbled, boys. (And in the case of Champix, some smokers are dying as a result of that trick.  Many smokers are taking it for longer periods than it was ever tested over, and suffering horrible side-effects that the short trials did not show up. Safety not proven. Unscientific procedure. Not evidence-based at all.)

Cue the long silence from the medical authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. There’s no way they are going to check that out by doing the experiment I have described - not just because there is a lot of money at stake, but also because they cannot bear the notion that an alternative health practitioner can prove the almighty medical profession WRONG. That a hypnotist can prove the scientific world WRONG. They would rather let millions more smokers die, and so would the Department of Health.

So - who would like to organise that trial instead? On behalf of all the smokers in the world. Personally I think the Chinese government should do it! The Chinese are very medically advanced, and they must be pretty sick of hearing sly suggestions from Western medical sources that acupuncture isn’t much practical use - are you hearing me, Edzard Ernst, Mr Professor Against Complementary Medicine? You think you’re publishing the truth about acupuncture? The Chinese could show you routine practical medical applications of acupuncture that would make you blush deeply, resign your silly bogus “professorship” and go home. Or just go back to your other occupation, which is rubber-stamping medications for the pharmaceutical industry.

Time to De-Bunk the B.M.A.

They are not being scientific, they are being ruthlessly authoritarian, and their wilful neglect - now that they know the real failure of NRT - makes them increasingly responsible for the death toll. Hypnotherapy and acupuncture could save thousands of lives and yet the powers that be just will not allow us to do that! Instead they insist on giving all the available resources away to their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, and they call that “evidence based”. Everyone involved in perpetuating that falsehood just to save face and to cynically maintain the status quo is a liar and a mass-murderer. These are no longer just “smoking-related deaths”. They are now unnecessary deaths caused by hype, corruption, lies, prejudice and misinformation.

How many more deaths, Doc? How much more unnecessary suffering? How many more Poison Prescriptions? So often, over the years, doctors and other medical personnel have privately admitted to me that they have known this to be the reality for some time. When are you going to admit that openly, and call a halt to this criminal waste of lives and resources? When are you going to stop pretending that proven methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture ‘don’t work’, Doc?

Lies. Corruption. Misinformation. Self-interest. A conspiracy of silence.  A holocaust every single calendar year.

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Filed under: Nicotine, The Book, The Campaign by Chris