by Chris Holmes
This message came in by email the other day:
Austrian Smokers rights wrote:
Tobaco is a wonderful indian ritual and healing plant: would you please take this skul and bones of “nicotine”; and replace it by Chmapix or NicVax the killing vaccines.
thanks
chritsine
Now, Austrian Smokers’ Rights have had a little pop at me before, for the same reason that the Ashtray Blog bloke did, who is a devotee of the electronic cigarette… because I had the temerity to suggest that nicotine is just a useless poison. Poisons are usually denoted by the symbol of the skull and crossbones, so it seems appropriate. True, the same symbol should be on the Champix packaging in my view – I’ll suggest it to Pfizer’s Head of Marketing next time we meet up for a beer. NicVax I know nothing about – yet. But the idea that a vaccine will fix a compulsive habit like smoking seems very dubious to me.
As for tobacco being “a wonderful indian ritual and healing plant”, that is an unusually positive view of it nowadays, to say the least! But if Christine is assuming that I am anti-tobacco or anti-smoking, she hasn’t read much of this site and has missed the point of it. I’m not pro-tobacco, but I am very liberal about what people do to themselves, even if it kills them. Mountaineering kills people, but I wouldn’t sign a petition to get it banned, would you?
Just because something is used in a ritual doesn’t mean it has any useful aspect to it. Humans and animals have both been sacrificed in rituals in the past, but that doesn’t make human or animal sacrifice a worthy thing. Rituals are not necessarily a good thing anyway, because they are simply repetiton of an act without questioning it, which can lead to all kinds of mad mucking about: look at that daft nonsense with Black Rod and the opening of the English Parliament – how silly is that?
Tobacco might possibly inhibit the development of Alzheimers, and prevent endometrial cancer. But the list of diseases it causes is far longer than that, so it certainly isn’t healthy to smoke tobacco, and the vast majority of the tobacco smoked in the world is certainly not part of any ritual, indian or otherwise. It’s just a dirty and rather pointless habit, but if anyone wants to smoke it that’s fine by me.
The whole point of this site is to denounce Nicotine Replacement Therapy as a scam which the Department of Health already know from their own research doesn’t work any better than willpower in the long run. I’m also calling for Champix to be banned, because anyone with half a brain can easily see that it should be.
My book is the first to explain what cravings really are, and why they have no connection to nicotine whatsoever. It also explains how we hypnotherapists routinely shut down all kinds of cravings without any difficulty just about every working day of our lives, including smokers’ cravings.
I didn’t write the book for the Austrian Smokers’ Rights group, though. I wrote it for any ordinary smoker who would like to quit but hasn’t found that easy, and anyone who is interested in hypnotherapy and the Subconscious mind. So the skull and crossbones stay, no apologies.
the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam