Tag: nicotine replacement

Gum, patch, lozenge, microtab, spray… strip?

Nicotine replacement therapy doesn’t work at all. But that hasn’t stopped GSK from reinventing it all over again with the nicotine oral strip.

by Chris Holmes

If nicotine gum works, why did they need to invent the patch? Well okay, maybe some people don’t like chewing gum, fair enough. But if the patch works, why did they invent the lozenge? And what is the difference, really, between the lozenge and the microtab?

If all these products do what they are supposed to do – which is to deliver nicotine a different way, so there is no urge to smoke tobacco – why does anyone need a spray? And the latest new-fangled nicotine product from GlaxoSmithKline is the nicotine strip! Surely that’s SLOWER than the spray? Are we going backwards in development now?

Try the NEW version of Nicotine!

Let me explain what is really going on. If a product does what it is supposed to do, it doesn’t need reinventing. That’s why wheels have remained the same shape over centuries. That’s the shape that works. If something doesn’t work, or doesn’t work for very long, you have to keep reinventing it in order to sell the idea again to the same people who tried it before, which is why there is always a new diet book out: Have you tried the new Fat Only Diet? (The madder it sounds, the more likely people are to hear of it, and therefore more people try it!) You ONLY eat fat. That’s ALL you eat. You can have as much as you like, every day, but you mustn’t eat anything else for three weeks. And you ONLY drink milk. Then, you see, your body gets used to ONLY burning fat for energy, and it just carries on doing that after you go back to normal food so it burns up all the fat off your body! It really works!

No it doesn’t!

No it doesn’t, don’t try it. Sounds plausible though, doesn’t it? And once the idea of nicotine replacement was established as a plausible idea, the mere fact that it doesn’t work at all has never got in the way of the marketing or the sales, for the simple reason that smokers don’t want to die so they’re willing to try anything that might help them quit. Now, not so very long ago the drug companies were telling smokers that using nicotine products meant you were “four times more likely” to quit than by merely using willpower. Then an NHS trust was rapped over the knuckles by the Advertising Standards Agency for repeating this claim in their literature, because it isn’t true. Then, in January 2012 Harvard University published research which proved that nicotine replacement products do not produce any better results, if you look at the results at one year, than willpower alone. They don’t work AT ALL.

Nicotine Replacement products are BOGUS!

Did this news prompt the NHS to stop wasting money on these useless products? No! Did they get banned or withdrawn? No! Are doctors still prescribing this rubbish? YES!! Believe it or not, this still qualifies as “evidence-based medicine”, even though it is NOT medicine and the evidence is very clear now that it doesn’t work at all. It is business as usual for the drug companies, the BMA, N.I.C.E. and the chemist – not to mention all the other outlets who sell this trash over the counter.

What it does mean, though, is that the drug companies have to be careful what they say in their advertising now, which is why the campaign last year pushing NiQuitin patches resorted to: “No other patch is more effective!” True enough: none of them work. Pretty dishonest lot, aren’t they?

New NiQuitin Oral Strips

So now we have the latest pointless reinvention of nicotine gum: the oral strip from GSK, “the first and only stop smoking aid in a strip” (try to contain your excitement, now!) What they are hoping is that all the smokers that have tried the gum, the patches, the lozenge, the microtab and the spray – all to no avail – will be able to suspend their disbelief somehow that THIS will be the delivery system that will save them. And although the science says quite clearly that it won’t, the drug company gets around that awkward fact by the ingenious wording of the latest claim: “All designed to double your chance of quitting compared to willpower alone.”

“All designed to.” It doesn’t say it will, it says it is designed to. What a crock of shit.

Real help to quit smoking

Success with nicotine products

I hate to break this to you, smokers, but your government doesn’t want you to realise that NRT doesn’t work because they don’t really want you to stop smoking.

by Chris Holmes

A full eighteen months after Harvard University proved that nicotine replacement therapy “is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long term than trying to quit on one’s own”, we might wonder why smokers are still being prescribed these useless products at the taxpayers’ expense. This is no longer an “evidence-based” medicine – in fact it is not a medicine at all and never has been. There is no such thing as “therapeutic nicotine”.

“Therapeutic” means it does you GOOD!

Nicotine is a poison. All the effects of nicotine are toxic, but the drug companies that produce nicotine replacement products have been funding research for years now, trying to find another application for the products because they know it won’t be long before all smokers know it doesn’t work at all. Every now and then stories pop up in the press reporting that “research suggests” that nicotine patches “might be useful” for this, or “could be helpful” for that.

The problem with “research”

Let us not forget that it was “research” which suggested in the first place that nicotine replacement poisoning “might be” helpful to smokers. The trouble is, they only looked at the short-term effects. This is what passes for “science” nowadays because research like this is organised and funded by the companies that make the products, and all they’re after is a licence. So those short-term effects don’t have to be impressive, they only have to be slightly better than a control group using a placebo. This is easy to organise: you just run several groups at the same time, some with placebos and some with the product, using only small numbers of people within each group.

Cherry picking

Why small numbers? Because when you convert that number into a percentage later, you magnify it. Then you cherry pick both ways: you take the placebo group with the lowest number of successes, and the product group with the highest. The difference in real numbers of successes may be no more than a random anomaly really, but as soon as you convert both figures into percentages it looks like a very clear and positive result. Sometimes they even stop clinical trials early because they have achieved that already and they don’t want to blunder on long enough to run into nasty side effects or relapses that may occur in the long term. It is okay for the end-user to blunder into that sort of thing, but we don’t want it mussing up the trial data.

Exclusions

Did I mention that we exclude anyone from the trials who might be fragile in any way mentally or physically? Just in case they don’t respond very well or have a bad reaction that might mess up the trial and make the drug look dangerous. Of course the end-user isn’t protected by being excluded. Doctors will prescribe it with confidence to anyone, because they fondly imagine that it has been proven in the trials to be effective and safe. It hasn’t.

The truth about NRT

The cruel truth is that nicotine replacement products are still being fraudulently funded by public money and recommended to smokers because it creates the impression that the government is doing something about smoking but in reality it does not reduce the tobacco tax revenue by being effective in stopping people smoking. In fact that official endorsement legitimises a bogus product which can also be bought over the counter, and the government collect Value Added Tax (meaningless phrase that, isn’t it?) from the sale of those products. Also, promoting methods that actually work – such as hypnotherapy, for example – would save lives, meaning that more people would live to retirement age and start claiming a pension when there are frankly too many people doing that already…

The truth about the Department of Health

So that is why, when the science proved that every penny of public money spent on nicotine products is completely wasted, the government pretended not to notice, just as they did when their own research came to the same conclusions in 2005 (the Borland Report). I hate to break this to you, smokers, but your government doesn’t want you to realise that NRT doesn’t work because they don’t really want you to stop smoking. They want you to smoke, then try the nicotine gum, then smoke, then try the patches, then smoke, then try the lozenges, then smoke, then try the microtab, then smoke, then try the nicotine spray, then relapse into smoking again and hopefully this will have taken so many years that you ALMOST get to retirement age but not quite.

And then they want you to die. That is what “success with nicotine products” means to them.

NRT: Biggest Quack Therapy in History

Truth Will Out calls upon the NHS to drop Nicotine Replacement products in the light of the latest proof that they are worthless, and also calls upon The Nightingale Collaboration to support that call or lose all its credibilty with regard to its stated aims “to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Now that the latest research from Harvard University has found that:

“…using NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy) is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long term than trying to quit on one’s own.”

– exactly as The Truth Will Out Campaign has been stating since May 2008 based on the UK government’s own research

… it is time for all interested parties in this debate to demand that the NHS drop this worthless poison nicotine, which has never been “therapeutic” and stop lying to smokers about its supposed efficacy. This global fraud is still being marketed, promoted and sold all over the world with the blessing AND recommendation of Medical Authorities and parties CLAIMING to be ‘scientific’ in principle and in practice, and these products have been wrongly labelled: “Evidence-based medicine”, when in fact they are neither medicine NOR evidence-based unless we are to allow the most blatantly misleading, shameless marketing spin to be regarded as evidence.

I think it was Edzard Ernst who said that there is no such thing as alternative medicine, there is only medicine: it either works or it doesn’t. His friends in The Nightingale Collaboration seem to agree: on their website they tell us that:

“We have set up The Nightingale Collaboration to enable us to share our knowledge and experience in challenging misleading claims in healthcare advertising and encourage anyone who is concerned in protecting the public from misinformation in healthcare promotion to join us in challenging it. Together we can work to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

Right – so that’s ANY kind of healthcare, right? So that would include all the misleading claims about nicotine replacement poisoning of the sort I’ve been exposing for years, surely? Now that we have numerous independent scientific reports that consistently show long-term effects mirroring the long-term outcome for willpower alone at around 6%, there is clearly NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS for the endorsement or promotion of these products and especially not at taxpayers’ expense, and the NHS – a public service – has no business pretending that has not been clearly established.

So all those supposedly ‘scientific’ individuals who style themselves “quackbusters” have a bit of a dilemma here, don’t they? They have designed their website carefully to make it look as though they are being all-inclusive in their bid to protect the public from lies and misinformation in the field of healthcare, but Martin Robbins’ “Lay scientist” piece in The Guardian annnouncing the launch of The Nightingale Collaboration completely gave away their real agenda: “A new skeptical campaign [which] aims to put the screws on alternative medicine.”

Question: Why be so coy about that on the Nightingale Collaboration website, then? Answer: To appear objective, mislead the public and pay lip-service to the notion that the same ‘rigorous’ standards of scientific enquiry into safety and efficacy should be applied to both conventional medicine (ConMed) AND alternative methods, when in fact thay are not investigating ConMed at all.

But to have any real credibility over your stated aim to be trying to protect the public regarding misleading claims in healthcare, Collaborators, you surely cannot ignore the biggest medical scam ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. NRT was originally approved on the basis of its performance at only 6 weeks. The manufacturers were even allowed to quote that short-term result on the packaging as if it were the actual success rate of the product, which I KNOW you would be up in arms about if it were a herbal remedy, or something like that. So come on: we’re challenging you, here, to demonstrate that what you loftily declare on your website isn’t just meaningless cant.

The UK government have known since The Borland Report was published in 2005 that the long-term outcome of NRT is the same as willpower, and yet they have carried on regardless with the purchase and endorsement of these products – fraudulently, with taxpayers’ resources – for a further seven years, deliberately wasting smokers’ time with products that they KNOW will not actually help them – and in that time something like a further 770,000 smokers in the UK have died. For you to wink at that, Collaborators, whilst getting all outraged about what some homeopath says on their website would prove you to be utterly insincere and fantastically petty, would it not?

This latest damning research from Harvard clearly proves Nicotine Replacement to be the biggest Quack Therapy in history and now this hideously corrupt boil on the face of healthcare must be lanced, so I’m sure, Collaborators, that you will feel that you must – for the sake of your credibility alone, if not your honour – join me in demanding that the NHS now DROP NICOTINE REPLACEMENT PRODUCTS AND ADMIT THEIR FAILURE AND USELESSNESS so that “we can work to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

No need to thank me for drawing this massive fraud and human disaster to your attention – after all, we’re working together here to protect the innocent – right Collaborators?

The easiest way to quit smoking

The Nicotine Myth Exploded

Advertising Standards Slam Bogus NHS Claim

The Advertising Standards Agency block an attempt by the NHS to suggest in a promotional leaflet that smokers are “twice as likely” to stop smoking with NRT and “four times more likely” with NHS Stop Smoking Services because the claims are “misleading”.

by Chris Holmes

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) have blocked an NHS advertising leaflet which claimed that smokers were “twice as likely” to quit with Nicotine Replacement products and “four times as likely” to quit if they also used NHS Stop Smoking Services. For the very first time since the Truth Will Out Campaign was launched, the claims have been rejected because quitting success implies a permanent solution but the NHS were relying on the results at only four weeks, which the agency concluded was not the same thing at all, and was therefore likely to mislead the public.

I’ll say it is. And since we now know from the Borland report that the results dwindle to 6% success at the end of twelve months, which is the same result as a number of studies have found for willpower alone, we feel vindicated in claiming that NRT doesn’t work at all in the long run, and is therefore a complete waste of taxpayers’ money and the NHS should abandon it altogether. Instead they’re going to waste more valuable resources printing up leaflets that say something like: “Did you know that nicotine skin patches and chewing gum can be effective in aiding withdrawal from nicotine?” (The bit in bold type is a direct quote from the British Medical Association’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, Dorling Kindersley 2002.) And now over to the March Hare, for the weather…

Here’s the link to the ASA story:

The Argus

**Update, January 2012: Harvard University publish a study that demonstrates NO USEFUL EFFECT from any form of NRT. Just as I said in the book in 2007, and on this site from March 2008.

Hypnotherapy is the easiest way of all to quit smoking, and despite the best efforts of Edzard Ernst to suggest otherwise, we will establish this as scientific fact and common knowledge in the end. The sooner the better. Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was fully explains the reasons for the complete failure of the medical approach and exactly how hypnotherapy wipes out compulsive habits like smoking, usually in a single session. As it says in the book, there is no such thing as “therapeutic nicotine”. Give it up, Doc.

more info about hypnotherapy for smoking cessation

Truth Will Out – A Worldwide Campaign

Smokers’ cravings are not withdrawal symptoms, but brain signals that can be shut down immediately with hypnotherapy. New Studies back hypnotherapist Chris Holmes on nicotine, the nature of withdrawal symptoms, and the uselessness of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning.

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

In every country, there are millions of tobacco smokers. The majority probably still believe that the reason they feel compelled to smoke is because they are addicted to a drug called nicotine. Yet if they had never been told this, they would have no concept of nicotine at all. Not one of them could tell you what nicotine does, and that is because they are not smoking for the effects of nicotine, and never were. They are prompted to smoke by the compulsive urge to pick up a cigarette, which is ‘compulsive’ because it feels like a need or a desire, when in truth it is neither. In hypnotherapy, we shut it down. (For a full explanation of this, read from the book here on the site, or download the entire book – It’s much cheaper than the paperback version!)

The essential message of this campaign is to tell the world that the impulse to light a cigarette has nothing to do with nicotine, and the book proves that for the first time, simply by logical explanation. All this suggestion about the role of “nicotine receptors” in the brain is bogus science. How do I know? Because in one hypnotherapy session, the impulse to light a cigarette can be shut down for good, without any reference to nicotine receptors whatsoever. This is the usual outcome of my Stop Smoking sessions, and many of my previous clients have been sending new people along to me for years, so it is obviously not temporary. If the brain truly “needed nicotine”, otherwise the nicotine receptors would “go crazy”, as the TV advert for nicotine products suggests, then such an outcome would be literally impossible. Yet that is the outcome of the majority of my Stop Smoking sessions, much to the amazement of the clients! But the only reason they are amazed is because they had been led to believe they were addicts, which none of them are.

This proves that medical authorities all around the world have got this horribly wrong, and all treatment options that are in any way related to the nicotine theory are also wrong, which explains their dire performance detailed elsewhere on this site.

Read it For Yourself

This site is all about evidence, so look at the evidence! The truth is that all nicotine replacement products – and Champix – are based on a myth, and the millions of people all over the world who are struggling to give up smoking are only struggling because they are being encouraged to use methods that don’t work, precisely because they are based on a myth!

This creates the understandable impression that it is really difficult to stop smoking. The truth is that it is really difficult to stop with conscious efforts alone (willpower), or methods that do not involve talking to the Subconscious mind about it, because all habitual behaviour is directed by the Subconscious. I’m afraid your Doctor probably knows nothing about this, because it is not part of their training. They were told it is a nicotine addiction, so that’s what they are telling you – although to be fair to doctors, most of them don’t actually believe that any more.

Ask anyone who quit with hypnotherapy and they will tell you, it is really easy to quit that way, because the cravings are shut down completely and no willpower is required.

The Message is Spreading!

Oh, Nicotine Replacement Poisoning, your days are numbered! I denounce you and all your apologists, for spreading disinformation and despair. That is not medicine, it is poison-peddling. I call upon the British Department of Health to stop wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on this useless poison, you know damn well it doesn’t work! Doctors, rebel! Refuse to prescribe the poison products, or you are going to end up looking very stupid by the time it eventually becomes common knowledge that this is only a compulsive habit, not a drug addiction.

Still, to date, not one visitor to this site has challenged my statements about nicotine replacement therapy. Why not, Doc? Not a word from any of the Poison Factories, either. If I made a product I was proud of, and really believed in, and someone denounced it as a fraud, as a bogus product that was dangerous and didn’t work anyway because it was based on a myth, and should never have been licensed in the first place because they only looked at very short-term results… I think I’d have something to say about that, wouldn’t you? If it wasn’t true I mean. But no – absolute silence!

Maybe they haven’t heard about Truth Will Out yet. They will. I am going to prove to the world that there is no such thing as “therapeutic nicotine”, and that smokers are not drug addicts, and that the real solution is hypnotherapy… if it takes me the rest of my life. **Update, Jan. 2012: The way it’s looking so far though, it probably won’t take that long. Check this for progress! **

*If you would like to know more about hypnotherapy to stop smoking the really easy way, without being poisoned, visit the Central Hypnotherapy website. Please comment if you have a view, or if you support the aims of Truth Will Out, spread the word! And on behalf of smokers everywhere in the world who have been lied to incessantly, thank you.

A Direct Challenge

Nicotine Replacement doesn’t work at all in the long run (Harvard University) yet smokers are still being encouraged to waste their precious time with them, to no avail, when hypnotherapy would save many of them immediately.

by Chris Holmes, Senior Registered Hypnotherapist (GHR) and Smoking Cessation Specialist

More and more people are telling me privately that lots of people who work within the National Health Services know perfectly well that Nicotine Replacement Therapy does not work for more than 90% of smokers in the long run, and do not believe precious resources should be wasted on it. The only reason they are not speaking up, I’m told, is fear. They are afraid to voice an opinion because they might then be regarded by management as a troublemaker or whistle-blower.

If that is true, then thousands of smokers are dying needlessly and many more are at risk of serious illness, having their time and taxpayers’ millions wasted on bogus therapies. Lies are being told about success rates to persuade more smokers to use these products (see the Evidence section on this site), and the real failure rate covered up. This is not healthcare, it is fraud, and it is costing many lives.

Nicotine Replacement doesn’t work because the whole theory of nicotine addiction is bogus anyway. It’s a compulsive habit. It is not “both an addiction and a habit”, as the latest NRT promotion spin would have you believe. I know that for sure, because if it was, hypnotherapy would not eliminate the problem.

Just about every working day, for years now, I have eliminated smoking habits (including tobacco and cannabis habits) with hypnotherapy – wiping out cravings, and preventing weight gain, and without the need for willpower. A complete return to normal, usually in a single session. It’s not a trick – the book explains exactly how it all works. Even if some of those people return to smoking later – as some do – we can stop it again, no problem. It’s a complete cure, and that is precisely because it never was a drug addiction but a compulsive habit, just like gambling. No drug involved, and we eliminate these behaviours without reference to dopamine, seretonin or ‘nicotine receptors’ in the brain too, which kind of makes you wonder what relevance those theories have in reality, especially since that was the ‘science’ that gave us Prozac. **Update, Jan. 2012: Psychiatrists admit the seratonin tale is bullshit! **

I am issuing a direct challenge to the NHS and the Department of Health, calling for them to scrap NRT and Zyban, because their real long-term success rates are so low that they function very poorly even within the normal placebo range, and it is beginning to look as if everybody knows it but they are just wishing it wasn’t so, and hoping I’ll get all disillusioned and go away. **Update Jan.2012: Scientists at Harvard University finally prove me right!**

Every day I get more determined to stop this scandalous waste of life and resources. Do you agree? Do you not agree? Can we have more comments posted on the site please, so visitors can hear other voices too? I am particularly interested in comments from those working in medical roles, but all comments are welcome.

My satisfied clients are always asking me: “Why can’t we get hypnotherapy on the National Health?” A very good question! It is time for doctors and nurses who also think that’s a fair question to start making their feelings known perhaps. If everyone speaks up, then there’ll be more whistle-blowers than non-whistle-blowers!

Far too many chemicals and hardly any therapists – that’s a drug service, not a HEALTH service. But nicotine is a poison, and no-one should be prescribed poisons, it’s insane!

By the way, if you are simply afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions, don’t forget you can do so here anonymously – and in any case, you can help out covertly by spreading the word: Truth Will Out!

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

More about hypnotherapy

Daily Mail article

It is really “evidence-based” medicines that are killing and harming people in ever-increasing numbers, not any sort of complementary medicine. Drugs are what the public need protecting from, not alternative approaches which hardly ever harm anyone!

I’m going to leave this subject aside for a bit after this, but thanks to my colleague up North who sent this in: a recent report by The Daily Mail’s Medical Correspondent Jenny Hope. Apparently the number of deaths in the UK from adverse reactions to medications has risen by 131 per cent since 1997. This is clear evidence that medications are killing and seriously harming people in ever-greater numbers.

The number of prolonged hospitalisations due to severe allergic reactions or serious side effects rose by 82% in the same period, totalling 41,935 people over the last ten years. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that these medications have not been tested as well as they should have been, and that at least some of them should not have been passed as if they were safe. Nicotine Replacement products certainly should not have been approved – but we’ll never know how many heart attacks and strokes they have caused, since that poison was stupidly given the official status of “medication”, despite having no medicinal properties whatsoever.

8,077 of these people with severe adverse reactions to medicines died as a result, with last year’s UK fatality rate of 1,031 being the highest yet. Let me make this quite clear: these people were not killed by illness, but by medicines that were officially approved as safe by the existing system. They proved not to be – and although a certain amount of this sort of thing is inevitable if you are going to prescribe drugs at all, these numbers are frightening – especially when you add that to the number of people now being killed by superbugs contracted whilst in hospitals. How long will it be before people are more afraid of doctors and hospitals than they are of being ill? Will more people end up dying soon because they are too afraid of medicines and hospitals to seek medical help?

To put it simply, medicines are supposed to make you better, not hospitalise or kill you. In the article, an unnamed spokesperson for the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency suggested that recent reforms had encouraged doctors, healthcare professionals and patients to be more pro-active in reporting adverse reactions to the Agency. “As a result,”she says glibly, “the number has gone up.”

As reassurances go, this leaves a lot to be desired. It is rather like saying: “Don’t worry, it isn’t really getting worse. It has always been that bad. We just improved our Making A Note Of It system.”

Oh. So what we are really seeing here is an improvement, is it? I can’t help wondering what Edzard Ernst, Exeter University’s Professor Against Complementary Medicine makes of all this. As a former member of the Medicines Commission of the British Medicines Control Agency (MCA), which has evidently been approving as ‘safe enough’ many of the medicines that have caused all this suffering and death, does he not feel agonized by the sheer hypocrisy of his ridiculous position in suggesting things like chiropractic and homeopathy are “dangerous”? He says nothing – nothing – about the thousands of innocent people being damaged or killed by the very medications he was personally involved in approving, but works very hard to make sure no-one can say anything positive about complementary medicine without him leaping up to object, and the truly sickening thing is that he claims to be doing that to protect the public.

From what – homoeopathy? When did that ever hospitalise anyone, you sneaky little Professor Against Complementary Medicine? If you really wanted to protect the public, you could do a better job of it by warning people about the real dangers of some of the medications that should never have been passed in the first place, like Champix for example. But protecting the public isn’t your real concern, is it Eddie? That’s just a pose. That’s why you keep referring to pharmaceutical products as “evidence-based”, when the real evidence is that they are killing and damaging more people than ever before, whereas complementary medicine obviously isn’t. You’re a Misinformation Machine, you are. Shame on you, Edzard. Shame on you and all your smug “quackbuster” buddies – you’re PROTECTING the real quacks (Pfizer, GSK et al) by creating this anti-CAM smokescreen in the media, and people are dying as a result.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest… if you would like to know more about hypnotherapy – which the medical authorities in the U.K. are still officially describing as “unproven” thanks to the unholy influence of the pharmaceutical industry! – visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.

They are lying, by the way: the British Medical Association endorsed hypnotherapy as a valid form of treatment in 1955. Of course, that was way back when they were a genuinely independent body, before they were controlled by the evil and utterly ruthless pharmaceutical industry.

Nicotine Contradictions

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Haven’t we seen an extraordinary shift in the way nicotine is regarded over the last couple of decades? When Nicotine Replacement products first appeared, they were only available on prescription. A doctor had to review each case, to see if it was safe enough or appropriate for the patient to use that. After all, nicotine is a highly poisonous substance which, in the wrong dose, could trigger a heart-attack or a stroke. It is often referred to as “the most addictive drug in the world”. Newspapers, renowned for their technical accuracy, have frequently observed that it is “more addictive than heroin”.

OK – so if all that’s true, how did we reach the current situation in which any adult can pick it up at Tesco, no questions asked? If it is a highly addictive drug, who decided it was okay to sell it at the filling station? Of course they sell cigarettes, but allowing that was not a recent decision! And I know you can buy strong painkillers like hydrocodone from an internet pharmacy, but that is because no government can stop it (apparently), it wasn’t the government’s idea to make that possible!

Whilst various bodies argue the toss about whether cannabis should be graded B class or C class in the scale of illegal drugs, the substance alleged to be more addictive than a class A drug is now on open sale in any supermarket, thanks to a series of increasingly liberal decisions which seem to take no account of its legendary ‘addictiveness’.

Seems a bit reckless, doesn’t it? I mean what is to stop people who didn’t even smoke in the first place becoming hooked on it too? Where are the usual safeguards that protect society from such dangerous substances? In pharmacies, diamorphine (heroin) is always kept locked away in the Dangerous Drugs Cabinet, which is bolted to the floor – but the nicotine products are out there on the supermarket shelves for any adult to pick up! So – why not just do that with everything?

“Excuse me! Do you have any Setlers Tums?”

“Sure! They’re just down there on the right, next to the most addictive drug in the world, the methodone and the smokable crack substitute. By the way, don’t miss our new special offer on high explosives, Aisle 9! Have a nice day!”

Doesn’t add up, does it? Especially when you consider that every single day, millions of people walk right past “the most addictive drug in the world” without any inclination to even try it – and that includes millions that are allegedly addicted to it already!

Try doing that with heroin, and by lunchtime it will be blindingly obvious why that cabinet needs bolting to the floor.

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

the hypnotherapy alternative