Spanish Nicotine Costa Packet!

I was interested to hear from a British ex-pat who has resided in Spain for most of the last ten years that the cost of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning in Spain has shot up during the time they were living out there. Apparently a packet of 105 pieces of delicious poison gum had gone from 16.35 Euros in the late 1990s to 27.70 Euros roundabout now.

by Chris Holmes

I was interested to hear from a British ex-pat who has resided in Spain for most of the last ten years that the cost of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning in Spain has shot up during the time they were living out there. Apparently a packet of 105 pieces of delicious poison gum had gone from 16.35 Euros in the late 1990s to 27.70 Euros roundabout now.

She also told me that you cannot buy NRT just anywhere in Spain, like you can here. As I said in an earlier post on this blog, I’ve seen NRT on sale in the UK in Pound shops (where everything on sale only costs one pound), which suggests that it is not in great demand! The wasteful U.K. government ‘initiative’ of providing free patches for a week (courtesy of the UK taxpayer) that ran at the start of 2011 also suggests that the sale of NRT is seriously flagging here, and I sincerely hope that the Truth Will Out Campaign has played a part in that over the last 3 years!

In Spain, however, you can only buy NRT from the Pharmacies, which pretty much makes it a racket. Don’t bother, people, it doesn’t work anyway! 94% failure (see home page). Hypnotherapy, acupuncture, Allen Carr method – all far more successful if you want to quit smoking.

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam 

more about hypnotherapy option

Champix for New Zealand next

 

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

Calling all smokers in New Zealand, and their loved ones: this is what is heading your way in November 2010 **Update December 2010: it’s already approved, but New Zealanders need to be warned about taking Champix:

“…the crashing wave of deep and dark depression, bursting into tears for no reason at all, the feeling of no light in the world and that nobody would even care if you were gone and worst of them all the belief that that low dark feeling was something that could only be fixed by taking your own life. Ive just lived this hell after taking Champix for a mere 4 weeks, first 3 were fine but wow that 4th week and i roller-coasted from ready to punch someone in the face for talking too loudly to wanting to floor my car 200 kms into a wall. I had read online about people reactions before mine kicked in and honestly thought everyone was a nut-job bad mouthing a drug that worked as i had stopped smoking and felt great, but let me tell anyone who reads this and brushes off the more extreme sounding posts IT IS NO JOKE. I went from wanting to simply give up smoking one week to sitting in a mental health clinic 4 weeks later continually in disbelief at how the hell i managed to end up there.” (Andrew)

This is becoming a matter of urgent concern to smokers anywhere, but particularly any smokers in New Zealand, following a story in the New Zealand Herald concerning the approval of public funding for Champix despite concerns about suicides linked to the drug – a story which partially reveals the kind of dodgy deals drug companies do with governments to push them into accepting things they’re not altogether happy about. In this case Champix was sold as part of a package including a number of drugs, and the suggestion is that the NZ government could not get those drugs at that price without taking Champix as well – a sharp practice that should frankly be illegal where medications are concerned, especially a medication that has already been linked to deaths, which is exactly what the former hesitation was about. Particularly suspect is the fact that the New Zealand government drug funding body Pharmac has apparently changed its mind about Champix for no good reason at all – see extract below from NZ Herald.co.nz:

“Pharmac medical director Peter Moody said medical advisers had “cautiously endorsed” the use of Champix.

The agency is calling for public submissions on the package deal from Pfizer before the taxpayer subsidy kicks in on November 1.

“Quite often [drug] companies will offer as a package a number of medications at the same time. We will look at the total deal and look at the benefits we’re getting.”

He said package deals meant all the drugs from the company had to be taken. “You can’t cherry pick.”

A Pharmac spokesman said the price reduction on Champix had been agreed and “in return for that we get two new products and wider access to one other product”.

A spokeswoman for Pfizer said the package deal was suggested by Pharmac, rather than the other way around. The drug company had submitted four separate applications to get the drugs funded.

She said the benefits of Champix outweighed the risks. The subsidy meant “more people will be able to access Champix to improve their chances of quitting smoking”.

Pharmac had twice considered backing Champix but rejected the move because of safety concerns.

Pharmac papers stated that it “appears increasingly likely that there is an association between varenicline [Champix] and serious neuro-psychiatric events”.

It also questioned whether Champix was as successful as nicotine replacement therapies.”

Yeah – quite right too: although earlier in the piece reporter David Fisher described Champix as: “a hugely successful drug used to quit smoking” which is “estimated to be successful in up to half the cases in which people use it to try to stop smoking”, in fact it is nothing of the kind. Long term success rates are about 14% for Champix, about the same as Zyban and only a little higher than Nicotine Replacement Poisoning, which might be pretty useless but at least it doesn’t make anyone kill themselves.

Put simply, this drug should NOT be approved for public funding in New Zealand because the success rate is pure hype and there are smokers alive and well in New Zealand today who will be dead within the year if the drug is made widely available. That means husbands and wives becoming bereaved single parents, kids left without a mum or a dad – and all because of cynical drug company lies and corruption. While there’s still time, I’m going to try to draw attention to this crazy decision and hopefully the innocent smokers of New Zealand can yet be saved from having the same evil stunt pulled on them as the innocent Champix victims in the USA, the UK and Australia.

Hypnotherapy is the best method for smoking cessation: New Scientist magazine

Here’s the NZ Herald article in full

Actual failure rate for Champix here.

18.09.10: I received this message by email, here it is in full:

Andrew wrote:
“Chris, i stumbled onto your site while looking up the side effects or as the Drs
have since told me “adverse effects” of Champix, i immediatly found
solace in the fact that many people’s descriptions matched mine, the crashing
wave of deep and dark depression, bursting into tears for no reason at all, the
feeling of no light in the world and that nobody would even care if you were
gone and worst of them all the belief that that low dark feeling was something
that could only be fixed by taking your own life. Ive just lived this hell after
taking Champix for a mere 4 weeks, first 3 were fine but wow that 4th week and i
roller-coasted from ready to punch someone in the face for talking to loudly to
wanting to floor my car 200 kms into a wall. I had read online about people
reactions before mine kicked in and honestly thought everyone was a nut-job bad
mouthing a drug that worked as i had stopped smoking and felt great, but let me
tell anyone who reads this and brushes off the more extreme sounding posts IT IS
NO JOKE. I went from wanting to simply give up smoking one week to sitting in a
mental health clinic 4 weeks later continually in disbelief at how the hell i
managed to end up there.

Now that Ive had my say to people who don’t believe it happens i want to give
every person that has fallen into that deep depression and suicidal thoughts
that have searched the web for info some hope and a true light at the end of the
tunnel because it was the one thing i was searching for but did not find. The
cause of your feelings is 100% Champix related and your brain WILL experience
happiness and normal thinking again, everyone’s neurotransmitters work
differently but what Ive found is however long it actually took the Champix to
work will roughly decide how long your brain takes to return to normal. Im no Dr
by any means but i was prescribed a low dosage of Valium / diazepan to
“take the edge off” from my Dr who told me in his experience giving
anti depressants not only didn’t work with champix related depression but in
some cases made it worse. Let me tell you the Valium worked to kill the anxiety
that came from continually thinking about killing myself and within a few days
the thoughts the anger and those messed up dreams stopped. So please if your
having the side effects as extreme as some i urge you to see your Dr or if your
in Australia get a referral to the mental access team through the various
Hospitals they helped me so much and i owe them my life literally. Scarily
enough their own words to me were you aren’t the first and you definitely wont
be the last to suffer this from Champix. I implore anyone considering this drug
to really think hard as it seems the chances of you successfully quitting aren’t
far ahead of the chance you’ll be sitting in a psyche ward as i did, even as bad
as cold turkey can feel its not even 1/1000 of how bad the reaction that i
experienced is. My only wish is to spread this exact message through as many
blogs and info sites about bad reactions to Champix, Chris feel free to use my
post anywhere you like, people suffering the effects NEED to see that there is
light at the end of this black tunnel.”

There are many more disturbing accounts like this in the Champix Chantix blog section of this site, and on many other blogs on the web. My urgent advice to smokers is to read around before deciding whether to try this medication.

safer alternative

Lennox Johnston – Nicotine Man!

Lennox Johnston was largely responsible for tobacco smoking being wrongly classed as a drug addiction when it is, in fact, a complex compulsive habit. At first, the medical profession were sure he was wrong. They should have stuck to that position, because he WAS wrong. See Chris Holmes’ book ‘Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was’ for the full story.

An excerpt from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II: A Change Of Mind) by Chris Holmes

ii). The tobacco story has so many curious twists and turns that I am never really surprised when another one pops up. In Volume One I mentioned that I hadn’t quite managed to discover exactly when the “nicotine addiction” story started, as an interpretation of compulsive use and I suggested that if anyone was intrigued about that then they should keep digging and if they found anything enlightening to let me know. This inspired Chepstow-based hypnotherapist Marc Bishop to investigate further and he contacted me recently to tell me about Lennox Johnston, of whom I had never heard.

The fact that I had never heard of him is interesting in itself, because it turns out that Lennox Johnston – and be honest, you’ve never heard of him either, right? – was the first person to use nicotine in isolation to offset the impulse to reach for tobacco. In other words he invented Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) – the very thing my book denounces. Now, NRT is prescribed and sold all over the world, so if we all know about innovators like Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, how come Lennox Johnston is never mentioned when people talk about NRT?

Actually it is probably because he was a bit like me: he made a bit of a nuisance of himself and everybody thought at first that he was wrong… which causes me to feel a certain, odd kinship with the chappie even though he is very much my adversary in this argument, for am I not in a very similar position here, trying to explain why smoking is not what most people presently think it is? Here is an extract from Johnston’s typical pronouncements to the editor of The Lancet circa 1953:

“I think it more sensible and scientifically satisfying to recognise tobacco-smoking as a drug addiction from start to finish. It varies in degree from slight to serious. The euphemism “habit” should be discarded completely… no smoker derives positive pleasure and benefit from tobacco. The bliss of headache or toothache relieved is analogous to that of craving for tobacco appeased.”

It is immediately clear that Allen Carr’s later observations in The Easy Way To Stop Smoking have their origins here in Lennox Johnston’s view, although I doubt Carr had ever heard of him either. He certainly never mentioned him in any of his own writings to my knowledge.

So what did the medical profession think of Johnston’s insistence that tobacco smoking was a drug addiction in the 1950’s? Well, we have managed to find this frank repudiation by none other than the Honorary Secretary of the Society for the Study of Addiction, one H. Pullar-Strecker, in response to Johnston’s assertions:

“Much as one may ‘crave’ for one’s smoke, tobacco is no drug of addiction. Proper addicts… will stop at nothing to obtain the drug that their system demands imperatively.”

Smokers often tell me that they are puzzled by the fact that although they wouldn’t normally go for nine hours without a cigarette during the day, when they are on a plane it doesn’t seem to bother them until they land, or very shortly before they land. The only exceptions seem to be smokers who resent the restriction, or have a problem with flying anyway. Likewise we hear of smokers seemingly untroubled by cravings during a spell in hospital, or more ordinarily whenever they go anywhere where smoking is commonly accepted as being out of the question, such as Mothercare or the Finsbury Park Mosque. It seems that as long as the smoker accepts that restriction, there will be no urge to smoke until they leave that situation. That is certainly not withdrawal, and falling nicotine levels in the body during the nine-hour flight (for example) are clearly irrelevant. The “nicotine receptors” in the brain are hardly in a position to appreciate the smoking ban on aircraft – or observe it – so this certainly begs the question “Why are they not ‘going crazy’ – as the NRT advert would have us believe is the cause of smokers’ cravings – in all of the situations mentioned above?” For of course Pullar-Strecker was right: the heroin addict cannot do that. If a heroin addict gets on a plane and the heroin level in the blood falls low then they are ill, it doesn’t matter what they are doing or where they are situated. That’s withdrawal.

Lennox Johnston was a Glaswegian GP who had been a smoker himself and according to his obituary in the British Medical Journal (Volume 292, dated 29/03/86) he quit smoking twice. It relates how he pondered his compulsion to continue smoking and “wondered what would be the effect of stopping” – only to find that it proved easier than he expected. A year or so later, he started smoking again and after that it took him “two agonising years” to give up.

Later he became an anti-smoking campaigner and began to experiment with pure solutions of nicotine which he often administered to himself, once with near-fatal consequences. He also wrote to The Lancet describing an experiment he devised himself which involved about thirty smokers who apparently allowed him to inject them with nicotine whenever they felt the urge to reach for tobacco, which Johnston claimed then subsided. Although this certainly does not qualify as a bona fide clinical trial, it can be regarded as the first ever attempt to trial nicotine replacement as a concept. The Lancet published Johnston’s letter, and so began the biggest medical mistake of the 20th Century – though of course, everyone thought he was wrong at the time.

Well – not quite everyone. Throughout the history of tobacco-smoking in Europe there have been occasional voices calling it an “addiction”, though quite what those individuals thought that term really meant is not easy to determine now. Yet for most of that history nearly everybody simply regarded it as a filthy habit – which is pretty accurate. A complex compulsive habit to be exact – for a full definition of that see Chapter Ten in Volume One, where I spell out the key differences between that and true drug addiction.

It is only very recently, in fact, that the “nicotine addiction” interpretation has become the general impression, and not everyone believes it even now. There have always been voices in the scientific community who have pointed out the inconsistencies, but they couldn’t explain the compulsive element because they didn’t have the key knowledge of the normal operations of the human Subconscious mind and how it organises and activates compulsive habitual behaviour. So they got shouted down – as did the tobacco companies who tried to point out that other habitual behaviours that did not involve any substances – such as shopaholics and compulsive gamblers – seemed to be of a similar order, but eventually they too accepted the new doctrine and dropped the argument. Not because it was invalid, but because they were pretty much on their own at that point, the anti-smokers were on a roll and have been ever since.

Factually, the tobacco companies were right… but because smoking is damaging to health they didn’t have a chance of getting their point heard as the scientific proof of real harm emerged during the 1960s and has continued to be the justification for everything that has changed since. Every anti-smoking policy or restriction that has been introduced since then has been justified with a reminder of the enormous harm tobacco smoking does to human health.

It’s a pity it never occurred to Lennox Johnston to wonder why he found it surprisingly easy to quit the first time, but it took “two agonising years” the second time. Surely the role of nicotine was the same in both cases and what that gives us straight away is the clue that nicotine isn’t the difficulty: the perception of ‘ease’ or ‘difficulty’ – even ‘agony’ – results from other variables, and that’s why expert hypnotherapy can usually resolve the matter on a single occasion but NRT does not.

The medical establishment thought Johnston was wrong, in fact they ignored him for years and don’t even talk about him now. The tobacco companies thought it was just a habit, as did virtually all smokers at the time. Some still do, despite all this mad nicotine propaganda that is really just marketing for NRT dressed up as medical orthodoxy.

The irony is, the medical establishment were in fact quite correct in the first place. So now it seems as if I’m the mad eccentric, when all I’m pointing out is exactly what everyone knew anyway before Lennox Johnston came along. If they had only stuck to their initial assessment that he was the mad eccentric, then they could have remained quite correct all along and we could have avoided this crazy detour around and around and around the poison nicotine, which is not the real reason people struggle to quit through their own efforts, as I explained in Volume One.

Lennox Johnston lived until he was 86, surviving long enough to see his initially-scorned pronouncements adopted as the standard medical view. By mistake.

Doubt if I will live long enough to see it corrected. Probably won’t get the credit either – but then, neither did Johnston -which is why none of us had ever heard of him!

more info about hypnotherapy for smoking

Champix Chantix: Legal action, class actions, suing Pfizer

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here.  The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become.  Protect others!  Report it.*

by Chris Holmes

Several times I have been asked about the options for suing Pfizer – the manufacturer of Champix Chantix – for damages over the horrific side effects some smokers taking the drug have suffered.  Such claims are already under way.  Lawyers in the USA and Canada are offering advice on this and this is only the beginning.

I cannot give any kind of legal advice, and I will refrain from commenting on the matter too because that is not my area of expertise.  I do believe that what we are now seeing is only the tip of the iceberg though, so if you have an interest in these matters you can expect the relevant facts to be changing as time progresses.  Just a few links that you might find useful to begin with, after which I advise you to use the search engines to find out more:

http://www.docken.com/

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Three+women+file+class+action+lawsuit+over+Pfizer+quit+smoking+drug/2686782/story.html

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/chantix-160/

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/topics/champix/

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/10/widow-sues-pfizer-over-chantix-after-husbands-suicide/

http://www.furiousseasons.com/movabletype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1134

http://www.uslaw.com/lawsuits/Chantix+Suicide?itemid=5

http://www.topix.com/forum/health/bipolar-disorder/THQ07G6LQAHTSM8OV

Other Useful Stuff:

Central Hypnotherapy

The Drug That Never Was

Remember When You First Started Smoking?

No smoker started smoking for the effects of nicotine, and no smoker can tell me what nicotine DOES! So they are not smoking for the effects of nicotine, because they don’t even know what those effects ARE. It is a habit, not “drug use”.

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

This month, the readership of this site has absolutely gone through the roof – and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Edzard Ernst!  Or at least, not much to do with him.  “Inconsistencies in the Addiction Story” is the page everyone is reading, and despite recent fuss over other pages this remains the most viewed page on the site after the homepage.

Smokers, I hope, are reading this.  Ordinary smokers and particularly those who would really prefer to be non-smokers but they don’t seem to be getting anywhere with willpower (though some do!) or any of the pharmaceutical aids.

Readership of this site has been steadily climbing every month since it was launched in March 2008, but it has suddenly doubled during March 2010, and that’s the post that did it.  The fact is, smokers have been told a load of misleading rubbish about the tobacco habit and far too many of them end up suffering and dying as a result. So a very warm welcome to all the new readers around the globe – read on, you don’t have to buy anything.

Early Smoking Experiences

There is an interesting difference in the way some of the smokers who have no intention of quitting anytime soon describe their early smoking experiences and the way my clients nearly always descibe them.  This shouldn’t surprise us because very few people are thinking positively about tobacco by the time they reach the hypnotherapy stage.

“What made you think of using hypnotherapy to quit?” I ask each new client, which is a way of assessing how many are direct referrals from previous clients, which is most of them.  If not, the usual response is: “Because I’ve tried everything else!”

Naturally, the first time a smoker attempts to quit the habit they are likely to try to do it all by themselves using willpower.  If that doesn’t work they are probably going to have a go with the thing that is most extensively advertised, namely nicotine replacement poisoning (NRT).  If they knew that it had pretty much the same long-term outcome as willpower they probably wouldn’t bother – but most of them do not, because that is a fact the Department of Health were trying to keep to themselves.

Then – once it became obvious NRT had no lasting effect – the smoker might try some of the pills, willpower again, a self-help book with a CD, NRT again in a different form, then eventually find their way to hypnotherapy.  “You’re my last hope!” is an expression hypnotherapists hear every other day.

Sometimes these smokers are beating themselves up about having ‘failed’ so many times.  Not so: they have been given the wrong information, and with the best will in the world thay have been trying to use that information to quit smoking.  It is the method that has failed, not the smoker.  In explaining this point to them, I often compare it to trying to open a combination lock.  If you have been given the wrong information you are going to struggle, and no amount of willpower is going to change that.  If someone suggests that the problem is that you’re just not trying hard enough, or you don’t really want to open the lock, they would be quite wrong.  Equally it might appear to either party as if it were “really difficult” to open a combination lock.  Which it is, if you have the wrong information.

But if you have the right combination, it’s a snap.

Then I explain to these smokers that they are, in fact, typical of the kind of people who successfully quit smoking.  “The ones who do not succeed either keep putting off the attempt – which you never did – only try once or twice and don’t have the heart to go for it again – you evidently don’t lack that – or decide in advance that there’s “no point” trying other methods because the first method didn’t work.  The fact that you’re here proves that you are not that poorly motivated or unimaginative.  In fact,” I conclude, rather to their surprise because they hadn’t really thought of it that way lately, “you are EXACTLY the sort of person who is going to succeed because you clearly won’t settle for anything less!”

That usually perks them up a bit, because right up until that moment they’d been giving themselves a hard time over it.

At some point in the conversation I will ask them to cast their mind back to their earliest smoking experiences, and put the question: “Do you remember why you were doing that, at the time?”  Never once in the ten years I’ve been helping smokers ditch the habit – and we’re talking about thousands of individual smokers here – never once has anyone said: “For the effects of nicotine.”

Next question: “Do you remember how it made you feel when you first learned how to inhale the smoke?”

Now it is not that unusual, if in conversation with a person who isn’t aiming to quit anytime soon, or has an axe to grind about alternative therapy, or is just cheerfully pro-smoking, to hear them declare: “Actually, I really liked it!  Yes, I took to smoking like a duck to water and I didn’t even cough! In fact I love nicotine so much that even during the night I have a couple of patches stuck to my forehead so I can dream that I’m smoking all night long!”

I’m sure you’ve met someone like that, but it is almost unheard of for that person to book a hypnotherapy session.  Nor should they, they’re obviously quite happy the way they are, being all ‘nicotine friendly’. And why not.

No, I only work with people who have already decided that they want to get rid of the habit, and they only give one of two responses to the question: “I don’t remember” or “It made me feel dizzy and sick”.  There are hardly any exceptions to this apart from the relatively few smokers who first tried tobacco when they already had alcohol in their system.  Some of those people will have experienced the effects of inhaling tobacco smoke much more like a ‘high’ than the rest, who just found it a sickening experience they don’t particularly enjoy recalling, so of course some of them don’t recall it.  This is normal – many people who didn’t have a very nice childhood will report that they don’t remember much about their childhood at all.

The Actual Effects of Nicotine

I ask all smoking clients: “Do you know what nicotine actually does?”  I have yet to encounter a smoker who does know.  The most common guess is: “I think it relaxes me, or something…”  Can we find a parallel in real drug use? A heroin user who doesn’t know what heroin does?  A coke-head that doesn’t know what cocaine does?  No, of course not!

If any future client were to confidently announce: “Why, yes!  Nicotine makes my heart beat faster than it should, reduces blood flow to my extremities which causes the poor circulation that can eventually result in amputation, and the combination of these two changes causes a rise in blood pressure.  It also raises blood fats levels, which is useless and possibly a contributory factor in heart disease, and finally it raises the risk of thrombosis!”

…then I would immediately ask them if they imagined for one moment that they were truly smoking for the effects of nicotine.

Smokers smoke because of cravings, that is true.  But cravings are nothing to do with nicotine or anything else in the smoke.  And we get lots of cravings, they’re not all about tobacco.  They are impulses from the Subconscious mind which prompt you to do what you would usually do at that moment or in that situation, and the factor that has confused everybody about cravings is that they are transmitted via the body and they are real physical experiences that can be mild or very unpleasant indeed, and they will always be interpreted as a ‘need’ or a ‘desire’.

If you respond, the signal will cease which is why it has been misinterpreted as a ‘withdrawal symptom’.  If you don’t respond you get another signal and they will often become more frequent and progressively more uncomfortable and distracting because the purpose of the signal is to distract you from what you are thinking about just long enough to recognise what the circumstances suggest (to the subconscious) you should do, and also to ‘prompt’ you to do something other than what you were already doing.  If you don’t respond the subconscious assumes you didn’t notice that signal so it sends another, more insistent one.

If you have made a conscious decision to stop smoking, the Subconscious doesn’t know, so it (quite innocently) keeps sending the reminders which the poor old conscious mind is now trying to ignore using willpower (conscious effort).  The problem with that is that willpower is an extra effort we don’t normally make, so you can’t keep that up.  You can do it for a while, but it is an effort!  And an effort that you cannot sustain so as soon as you run out of steam – or get distracted by something else – the smoking habit is simply reasserted by the Subconscious mind because those conscious efforts didn’t change anything about it, they were simply a temporary conscious effort to repress the behaviour by force.

If I were wrong about all of this, and it were all about drug dependence, addiction and withdrawal then all of my smoking clients would walk out of my office the same way they walked in.  As would the drinkers, the gamblers, the cocaine-users and the chocoholics… but they don’t.  Cravings and habitual behaviours can be shut down in a hypnotherapy session provided the therapist is a successful specialist in those matters and the client is quite happy to be rid of the problem and has chosen the hypnotherapy route willingly.  True withdrawal symptoms can not be shut down in that way.

In Chapter Ten of Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was I define the Compulsive Habit as distinct from addiction which is the big gap in the medical understanding of these matters, which has got all messed up with theories about dopamine etc. because an understanding of the Subconscious mind is not a part of their training, not is it part of our general education but it should be.  We were all raised and educated in the first place with no mention of a subconscious mind, which leads to the current generalised notion that the conscious mind is the mind and it doesn’t really like the idea that there is another one!  Which is why I repeat the observation in the book a number of times that “the conscious mind doesn’t really believe in the Subconscious mind, except perhaps in theory”.

And by extension, doesn’t really believe in hypnotherapy until the results are encountered for real.  It is not a magic trick.  It is not a parlour game. It is not mysterious in any way, it can all be explained and accounted for. It is not remotely dangerous or risky, but stage hypnosis unfortunately makes it look as if it might be which is why that always needs explaining before we start doing any therapy!

Hypnotherapy is often regarded as alternative medicine, which is wrong on two counts. Firstly, it is not alternative because it was officially recognised as a valid therapeutic approach by the BMA and also their American counterparts in the mid-1950s, so it is orthodox and it has been, and is, used in both medicine and dentistry, though nowhere near as often as it would be if it were not for all the misinformation, prejudice, unnecessary fear and ignorant scoffing that we have had to contend with for the last couple of centuries.  Secondly, although it has medical applications hypnotherapy is not medicine, it is 100% communication so it has more in common with educational procedures than medical ones, and the current, almost universal lack of understanding of the Subconscious mind is entirely down to the Subconscious-shaped hole in our traditional models of education.

more about hypnotherapy

Inconsistencies in the ‘Addiction’ Story

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

The Addiction Myth

Yes, it is the case that many smokers find it very difficult to give up smoking.  Cravings can drive you up the wall.  Trying to ignore them can make you very irritable or reduce you to tears.  Smokers can sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to obtain tobacco.

All true.

These facts have often been pointed to as a way of refuting my statements that nicotine is not addictive, tobacco smoking is not drug-taking and cravings are not withdrawal symptoms.  The people mentioning these facts do not know (or simply do not believe) that all those experiences can be shut down in a single hypnotherapy session provided it is conducted properly and the client is content to be rid of the habit.  Before the session, the client may have mixed feelings about that but those matters can be resolved during the session itself as long as the therapist knows what they’re doing.

Let’s leave hypnotherapy aside for the time being and examine the addiction idea. It is equally true that some smokers find it quite easy to stop smoking, and wonder what all the fuss is about.  Some are scarcely bothered by cravings for long periods during the day if they are out shopping, gardening or playing sports. Sometimes smokers run out of cigarettes but can’t be bothered to go to the shop until the following day if it’s raining or just cold outside.  Yet people often say to me: “But isn’t nicotine the most addictive drug in the world?”  Let’s just consider a few curious aspects of that notion.

Point One: Nicotine is the only notable ingredient in Nicotine Replacement Treatment (NRT) Products like patches and gum.  These products are available for sale in any supermarket, right there in the household health products section, aisle 17, alongside the heroin and the crack cocaine.  No sorry, right next to the vitamins and the baby powder.  The “most addictive drug in the world”?  What is it doing there?  It’s not even kept behind the pharmacy desk in the supermarket like baby medicines such as Calpol!

Cigarettes, too, are available for sale in the same supermarket but those have always been for sale in shops, that is not a recent change in the law.  Even so, you cannot just pick them up off the shelf, you have to go to the tobacco counter and ask for them.  Soon they will be hidden under the counter but Nicotine itself – the most addictive drug in the world! – will remain right there on the shelves next to the Olbas Oil and the Kids’ Vitamins.  Doesn’t that strike you as dangerous neglect?  Shouldn’t the most addictive drug in the world be in a restricted zone, or something?  Aren’t unaddicted, non-smoking people being needlessly exposed to the most addictive drug in the world there?  Doesn’t that sort of retail practice suggest that nicotine is no more threatening than the vitamins?  True, they also sell bleach and other potentially dangerous substances, but not for consumption!  And no-one has ever suggested that those were drugs, or ‘therapeutic’ in any way.  The very ordinariness of this mode of presentation does not fit the suggestion that nicotine is the most addictive drug in the world!

Point two: When these products were first licensed, you could only obtain them if you went to your GP, who would check your general health status because it is well known that nicotine is dangerous, especially to anyone with a heart condition and/or high blood pressure.  Somehow that cautious position has been abandoned, as if medical people ceased to care about such things, and nowadays you can just buy it anywhere no matter how much of a risk you might be running.  I have even heard of smokers who are in hospital after a heart attack being given nicotine patches despite the rather obvious fact that they weren’t going to smoke anyway for a while, being laid up in a hospital and very likely scared to death of pushing their luck at that point even if they did have an opportunity to smoke.  Which they don’t, so why anyone with even a modicum of medical training would deliberately feed nicotine into their system at a time like that is beyond rational explanation.  And if a second heart attack resulted from that, I’d say that’s manslaughter.  They certainly wouldn’t give the poor soul anything else that would increase their heart-rate and blood pressure at a moment like that, so why nicotine?

Because of the stupid ‘addiction’ tale.  That is the only reason, and it’s a mistake.

Point Three: When people break into chemist’s shops or pharmacies – to steal real drugs of course – do they ever bother to steal the NRT?  Did you ever encounter a dodgy character in a pub selling knock-off nicotine patches?  No?  Well why not?  The place is full of “nicotine addicts”, isn’t it?  The truth is, no-one does that because no-one wants the stuff, you would have trouble even giving it away.  There is no black market in nicked nicotine whatsoever. I’ve even seen NRT products for sale in Pound Shops! “The most addictive drug in the world”?  Think again.

Knock-off ciggies though?  Now you’re talking!  So it is not nicotine the smoker craves, but their usual habitual object – the cigarette.  Or if they are a pipe smoker, they wouldn’t want a cigarette at all.  If they are an habitual cigar smoker, they wouldn’t want to smoke a pipe and are highly unlikely to do so even if they have no cigars. Do we see heroin addicts being so sniffy about delivery methods when withdrawal kicks in?  No.  Which takes us straight on to:

Point Four: Real habitual drug users usually do not give a damn what form the drug comers in.  If they have the luxury of a choice they will have preferences, but are most unlikely to do without if anything is available that can be abused.  They are notorious for abusing anything from cough medicine to poppers if nothing else is around, but no-one abuses NRT products because there is no buzz, no pleasure to be had.  If you ask a real habitual drug user when they first started using drugs, will they answer that question by telling you when they first started smoking tobacco?  No, they’d never think of that.  They’ll tell you when they first started using drugs.  Totally different thing.

Point Five: Why do we never see youngsters or teenagers abusing NRT products?  If it’s nicotine they’re after, surely it would be easier to sneak around school wearing a patch than risk getting caught with smelly, smoky cigarettes – what a giveaway!  Will we ever hear teachers saying: “Turn out your pockets, sonny – and take off your shirt while I check you for patches!”  No, of course not.  No kid would be seen dead with nicotine patches, what sort of rebellious devil-may-care statement is that?  They wouldn’t bother with them in private either, because nicotine is not what teenage smoking is about.  And when we were 13, we all knew that, too!

Point Six: Cigarette smokers who have run out of cigarettes will often politely refuse the offer of a cigarette from a friend because they dislike that particular brand.  I did that many times myself when I was a smoker.  Much earlier in my smoking career though, I would sometimes find myself searching everywhere for cigarette-ends that might yield enough shreds of tobacco to roll up into a rather pathetic apology for a cigarette, but I certainly never did that after my teenage years.  I also learned through experience that some brands were particularly nauseating to me, so as time went on I would politely decline those even if I had no cigarettes of my own.  What kind of ‘drug addiction’ develops from quite desperate-looking, indiscriminate indulgence to choosiness as time goes on?  Real drug addictions typically develop the opposite way around.

Point Seven: It is quite common to see smokers who have smoked for twenty years who nevertheless only smoke five or six a day, and just as unremarkable for a relatively new smoker to smoke twenty a day or more.  I knew one woman who only ever smoked one a day, just before bed, but did that for decades.  Some smokers only smoke if they go out, or if they are drinking alcohol.  Some people only ever smoke on a special occasion, such as at a wedding reception. “The most addictive drug in the world”?  How are they getting away with it?

Point Eight: Nowadays, few people can smoke at work so quite a lot of smokers don’t smoke all day, then go home and smoke nine or ten cigarettes whilst watching TV.  It’s not like they need NRT to get them through the working day – the only time smokers buy that is if they are trying to quit altogether!  So, are these people unaddicted all day long at work, and then suddenly addicted again in the evening?  Are they ill at work because of this?  No!  They might find that it irritates them when the change  is first introduced and they are obliged to adjust their habitual routine, but very quickly they find that it doesn’t bother them much at all.  Just like the way smokers adjusted quite easily when it was banned on buses, on trains, in theatres and cinemas.  Now that smoking in bars and pubs is no longer an option, many smokers have noticed that the number of times they light up has reduced without them making any effort to reduce it.  Has their “need for nicotine” somehow waned?  Why aren’t the ‘nicotine receptors’ in their brains “going crazy!” like in the TV NRT advert, forcing them outside just as often as they smoked inside the bar?

Because smoking is a compulsive habit, not a drug addiction.  All these are examples from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was.  There are many more in the book, 400 pages of evidence that clearly demonstrates that the nicotine tale is a lie, and explains what smokers’ cravings really are and how we shut them down in the hypnotherapy session.  I’m not going to re-write the entire book here obviously, anyone who is interested in learning more about that can read it for themselves.  By the way, on the book link above there is a download option to the right of the page that comes up.  You can read the whole thing for just five pounds sterling (less than eight US dollars).

People who attack my book (nearly always without reading it) by citing “scientific studies” are just repeatedly playing the “Everyone knows it’s a drug addiction, and here’s the scientific proof!” card, in the hope that smokers won’t bother to actually read the book for themselves, or closely examine the methodology of the actual ‘scientific’ trials but just assume that nicotine addiction is scientific ‘fact’.  These are the sort of studies that assured us all that Prozac was more effective than placebo, that Champix and Zyban were effective and safe smoking remedies – nay, Wonder Drugs!  Some of the studies that are supposed to prove that nicotine is an addictive substance – collectively known as the animal IVSA tests – are closely analysed in my book and prove to be full of obvious contradictions so they don’t prove any such thing in reality, yet they are still cited by medical bodies like the Royal College of Physicians AS IF they do, because those people are hoping you will just believe them without looking at it any more closely! They are donning the white lab coat and talking down to everybody, taking smokers for fools and it is all because nicotine has become a huge global money-spinner, with smokers and taxpayers picking up the tab.

The ‘addiction’ suggestion/interpretation of tobacco smoking plays a very big part in keeping the whole sorry mess dragging on for decades, and it is time for that fundamental medical error to be revealed as such, so that smokers can stop wasting their time with products that don’t work any better than willpower, and get some proper help for a change.

Killer Chantix Champix Isn’t Magic

by Chris Holmes

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

The weird and wonderful internet just threw up another amusing splinter of craziness in the form of an email message, sent through the Truth Will Out Contact Form facility, from a website called ChampixMagic.  It purported to be from a person called Jay, and it said:

Jay wrote:
Dear sir/webmaster,
I am the responsible person for link exchange at chantixmagic.com  I visited your site and feel, it’s a quality one and relevant to my site theme. So I hope that you would consider link exchange with us. If you determine that a link to our site is appropriate, Please let me know whether you are interested or not. If yes please provide your site info.

I find it very hard to believe that Jay has ever visited the Truth Will Out site.  I think it is much more probable that this message is sent out automatically to any site that mentions Champix a lot.  There follows here an excerpt from one of my earlier posts that mentioned it under the heading CHANTIX CHAMPIX KILLS, BUT A.S.H. WON’T TELL THE SMOKERS, and it also mentions the ChampixMagic site:

Now look at this, which purports to be a “Trusted Information Bank” about Champix (Chantix).  At the base of the page, a disclaimer states “We don’t encourage the buying and selling of Chantix without prescription”, which is a weird thing to claim when you can buy it right there, via the site!  It mentions nothing about any dangers, but says:

“Chantix is the latest blockbuster drug approved by the FDA on May 11, 2006 that is indicated as an aid to quit smoking. Manufactured by Pfizer Inc., Chantix offers a new approach, different from the existing smoking cessation therapies to quit smoking.”

It does not mention that the drug is now under investigation by the FDA for serious side effects.   Instead it uses crude scare-tactics in the first two, very badly written paragraphs about the dangers of smoking to suggest that Chantix is your ‘only hope’, if you are a smoker, to escape ‘certain death’. The site is called ChantixMagic and it is dangerously devoid of any serious warnings about how this medication could wreck your life or even end it.

In reality, Champix is a pretty faint hope because it doesn’t work for at least 80% of smokers even with all that hype.  In contrast, expert hypnotherapy has a 60% success rate in first sessions alone.  If you include the successes that took more than one session (some do, it’s inevitable, people are not all the same) then the overall success rate is well over 80% PROVIDED the therapist is a smoking cessation specialist with plenty of experience.

I should also qualify the above statement by saying that I’m talking about success rates in countries in which tobacco use is in general decline.  I work in the U.K. where only about 26% of adults still smoke, so smoking is not the norm.  In countries like Greece and China where there is a much greater proportion of smokers, the long-term success-rate of hypnotherapy would not be as high because the influence of other people smoking has a bearing on relapse rates for all quitting methods, including hypnotherapy – as does the general social perception of what is “the norm”.

So you see, ChampixMagic, I already have a link to your site but I don’t think it was quite what you had in mind.  Since all you want to do is sell more prescription medications without prescriptions or proper warnings regardless of whether it harms or kills people, I suggest you go throw yourself off a cliff.

safer alternative

 

Chantix Champix Kills: But Don’t Tell The Smokers!

The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix.

by Chris Holmes

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

 

The Real Threat to Doctors, Pharmacists and the Medical Profession

To learn the truth about Chantix Champix, all you have to do is Google “Champix suicides” (or Chantix suicides) and read all about it for yourself.

But why should smokers have to do that? Most smokers assume that their doctor or their pharmacist would warn them of any serious risks that their patient might be running if they take Chantix Champix. Some do: in fact, we have heard anecdotally of one or two doctors who have refused to prescribe it. However, these are the exceptions.

Reading around the blogs which are dealing with the Chantix Champix controversy it becomes frighteningly clear that most smokers are left completely in the dark by doctors and pharmacists about the serious side effects of Chantix Champix, and only warned about the minor ones. The fact that this negligence is leading to injuries and deaths must surely be actionable. We are talking about a medication that is currently under investigation by the FDA for serious and dangerous side-effects. It has been very clearly implicated in many suicide attempts and a considerable number of deaths. Many other people have had other horrible reactions that have left them hospitalised, terrified and emotionally damaged, and also Chantix Champix has wrecked relationships and families.

Your doctor and your pharmacist may decide, though, that they’d better not tell you that in case you decide not to take the damn stuff.

One recent contributor to this blog, Kath (see Champix 4: Enough Already. Comment No.98) – was particularly angry about that point, once I had explained that she was not alone. She said:

“Chris thank you for taking the time to respond to me. As I read your reply what really stuck out is that when I had a weird episode of behaviour at 4 weeks, I would have known where it was coming from if I knew that Champix has side effects. If my doctor had warned me to watch for behavioural changes I would have been off this drug much sooner, before it made me into a blubbering mess. That is what bothers me the most.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about how even the doctor makes money when he writes a script. That is really effed up. How can my doctor have a financial benefit to prescribing a drug? What the hell kind of world are we living in? How can we expect to get proper health care when the gp’s make money for giving us life-threatening drugs?”

How indeed. And this is the real threat to the future of the medical profession. It is obvious why Chantix Champix is getting the whitewash treatment, and it all comes down to money. Doctors are treated to free trips, lavish treatment at ‘conferences’ and all kinds of incentives to promote medications which can all be summed up in one simple word: Corrupt.

How complacent are you, all you medical professionals who are just sitting on your hands and pretending it is okay to keep taking the incentives and keep your mouths shut about killer drugs like Chantix Champix? You keep pretending nicotine replacement is a real medication even though you know it doesn’t work at all, you keep prescribing Prozac and Seroxat even though we all know now that they didn’t perform any better than placebos in the trials… Your professional credibility is rotting away even as I type this, and the stench of your corruption is making even the most conservative of patients wince. If you continue down this road there will BE no medical profession, it will all become Medico-Pharmaceutical Inc.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then have a look at this report by one of the few exceptions, a blog edited by practising Canadian pharmacists called Canada Pharmacy News. The story points out that The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix. Only a few days ago, the Justice Department in the USA announced that Pfizer had been ordered to pay a record settlement of 2.3 billion dollars for “fraudulent marketing”. Nothing to do with Chantix Champix, that one, by the way. But this is (link).

The credibility of pharmacists and doctors was originally based on hard science, but it has all been hijacked by the medico-mafia of the drug companies and their well-placed friends in the medical authorities, the medication approval bodies, academia and the press. Once you’ve lost that credibility in the minds of the public, Doc, you will never get it back.

practice website

The book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

A Simple Test to Prove that Nicotine Isn’t Addictive

How to run a clinical trial using nicotine patches to prove that nicotine cannot possibly be an addictive drug.

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

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 tension and stress is real enough, but it has nothing to do with nicotine at all. If it did – 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 him than me! That’ll be another funeral then.”

“You reckon?”

“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 cynical 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? 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, 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). All craving signals wiped out in two hours. No urge to smoke, no extra eating, no weight gain. No ‘addictive drug’ involved.

want to quit the habit the easy way?

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.