Tobacco products used to be widely prescribed for a dizzying number of ailments. In the west they are no longer prescribed by doctors for any ailments. The medicinal value of smoking is near 0. It's like the medicinal value of nuclear bombs. Great for population control but there are serious side effects.

It does have some 'medicinal' value, though. It's a great pesticide, because nicotine is seriously poisonous not only to humans but insects also. Nicotine and especially neonicotinoids, chemicals derived from nicotine, are widely used as pesticides. Imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid, is the most widely used insecticide in the world.

Smoking used to be prescribed as a means of weight-control because, for some people, it suppresses hunger. Many others find that they eat more when they smoke. Killing yourself is a very effective means of weight-control, if somewhat extreme. There are better means out there than smoking, even if it works for you.

In any case, the idea that you will gain weight when you stop smoking applies only if you substitute eating for smoking. But our approach does not require substitutes: you don't need a substitute for something you don't want.

The idea that smoking has medicinal value is a very old misconception. Some would be less kind and say it's an outright lie or even a mountainous pile of bs. It's important to get a sense of how large that mountain is and why it's so huge.

First, how old is this mountain? It's thought that people have been smoking in the Americas for about 5,000-9,000 years. When Europeans first sailed to the Americas, tobacco, already for thousands of years, had been widely used by the indigenous peoples as one of their most sacred spiritual and medicinal plants. It was used by native Americans for asthma, for earaches, toothaches, fatigue, and scores of other afflictions. Smoking was prescribed for things that it very plainly makes worse, not better. Smoking for asthma? Smoking makes asthma worse.

When Europeans made contact with the people of the Americas in the late 1400's, the alleged medicinal value of tobacco was what excited them about the herb. It wasn't long before smoking and other forms of tobacco consumption were widely prescribed throughout Europe by doctors. It was even widely touted as a panacea, a cure-all.

Why did native Americans and Europeans alike tout tobacco as having such amazing medicinal value?

The relief addicts get from smoking provides a convincing illusion that they feel a lot better when they smoke, whatever is ailing them—as long as the smoking is not making them feel lousy, which happens more, over time. In European culture, there is the added capitalist incentive of selling something to people that is addictive. Tell them that it's highly medicinal as a means of attracting and keeping customers.

But, above all, above the physical addiction and the craven force of jackals anxious to exploit weakness, there is the human desire to be comforted with medicine from our afflictions. We are sometimes afraid and seek something to bolster us. Life is challenging and we feel we need help with the challenges we face, often. Psychological addiction is all about believing we are getting crucial help from something that isn't helping us at all—on the contrary, it's hurting us, but we attribute to it the ability to help us get through what we need to get through. The idea that it's hurting us, not helping us, seems ridiculous because we plainly need help and can't do it without some help. Yet we do do it without help, have been doing it without help all this time. On our own. The addiction has merely served to provide the illusion of help—and to poison us.

From now until the end of the world—and from now back in time to the dawn of consciousness—we have felt insecure and inadequate to the tasks in front of us, to survive and make our way in the world. We have felt fear and looked for help for our fear and for our limitations. That's just part of being human. It's not a sin. It's not contemptible. It's an occasional part of being a sentient being.

We are often willing to accept a convincing illusion that something (or someone) is helping us because we so desperately believe we need help and can't make it without some help.

People want to believe smoking helps them. Smoking has been ascribed any number of medicinal properties that it doesn't have. And those stories go back in western culture to the 1500s and, before that, thousands of years in native American culture. It's the enduring nature of human frailty that gives them their long-livedness, not any enduring medicinal value of tobacco. At best, tobacco provides a comforting illusion of supplying well-being by providing relief from the irritating withdrawal symptoms it itself causes.

There is a very long list of ailments smoking has been said to help with, which it doesn't. There are also many myths about how excruciatingly difficult it is to stop smoking. The former serve to draw you in to smoking and the latter serve to keep you smoking.

It isn't difficult to stop smoking if you dismantle the amplifier of nicotine hunger; you then do not have to exercise outrageous amounts of willpower. The amount of willpower you have to exercise is like the willpower involved in deciding not to cross the street if you don't want to. If you have no desire to cross the street, very little willpower is required to refrain from it.

Western culture has 500+ years of persuasions to smoke, from alleged medicinal powers to intellect-enhancing powers to claims that it makes you sexy or it makes you one of the boys (or girls) or it just plain feels good...you would think there's virtually nothing it can't help you with, to judge from the claims made for it over the years.

Governments have had an interest in people smoking because of the tax revenues it brings in. Health-care has been involved first by using smoking as something that was prescribed for many ailments and then, later, in developing the whole apparatus to treat the ailments caused by smoking. Medicine now has a different approach: help people stop smoking by transferring their addiction to gums and other nicotine replacements. This transfers the addiction to a product controlled by the health care system.

Dismantling the psychological addiction is not difficult, but it relinquishes the customer. It sets the addict free from her/his addiction and from financial dependence on the nicotine supplier. It frees the consumer from being consumed by the businesses feeding on them. It gives addicts something rather than taking from them, exploiting them.

Obviously it's much less profitable than selling addicts their ongoing fix. But for anyone who has lost loved ones to lung cancer or throat cancer or any number of other smoking-related diseases, there is no sweeter gift you can give someone than to help them grasp and take their freedom. That freedom doesn't solve all problems in life, but it solves a bunch of them.

And, if you want it to last, which of course you do, you have to cultivate your joy. Every time you feel the dying twinges of desire for a cigarette, which will only happen for about a week, and those twinges won't be very strong at all—not anywhere near an 'urge'—you must rejoice in your freedom from smoking. You may observe the twinge of mild hunger you are feeling and regard it as a specimen, as a little dying monster in a test tube. The little monster would be pitiable were it not such a vile blood-sucker indifferent to your destruction. Soon to be dead after a week when your physical addiction is over.

Feel the joy of knowing that you are free from 'urges' to smoke. Relish it. Think about what it is that freed you: your understanding that smoking does not give you what you thought it gave you. Eventually, you won't so easily fool yourself into believing it does give you good things, any more than you can fall for a card trick you understand the workings of.

Also, something else that's very important to understand about what freed you: you might not realize it or give yourself much credit for it but it's very important. You were brave. You opened your eyes and looked at something you've been studiously ignoring. You looked carefully at why you continued to smoke and you looked at whether it was giving you what you thought it was giving you and you realized and acknowledged that it wasn't.

You have dismantled your psychological addiction to smoking which amplified the twinge of mild hunger into 'urges' to smoke. You have dismantled the amplifier. And have begun to build a different amplifier. An amplifier of your joy and freedom into something that helps you appreciate your freedom and know it to be something you don't want to surrender.

That is important to keeping your freedom. Every time you get a twinge to have a cigarette, ask yourself if it's a twinge or an urge. It should just be a twinge, a small twitch of a dying physical addiction, if this book is working for you. If this book is working for you, when you get such mindless small twitches, which you will, occasionally, for about a week, consider it simply as a reminder for you to appreciate your new found freedom, health, and awareness. If you didn't know already, you have come to understand what it means to free yourself from powerful illusions. That's a strong experience that you can accomplish in various spheres. Like what? What other illusions on other matters do we cherish?³⁹

You've attained a new perspective not only on smoking and stopping smoking, but on yourself, desire and illusion, freedom and slavery, corporate conformity and personal choice.

Remember that you're hooked when you think you want one. You have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself if it's a twitch or an urge. If it's a twitch, then it will pass very quickly. It's simply a dying physical addiction. If it's an urge, then the amplifier is working. It means you are still hooked. Where is the hook set? What do you think smoking gives you? Give the book another read. If you haven't read Allen Carr's book The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, read it.

If the book isn't working for you, that is, if you are not going to stop smoking now, that's OK. It doesn't work for everyone, but most people at least learn important things that will help them permanently stop—eventually. If it isn't working for you, the important thing is to move on without blaming yourself. Try another method that appeals to you as soon as possible. For many people, stopping smoking requires a bit of practice. But if your attitude has changed—if you are no longer OK with remaining hooked indefinitely—then you are on the road to freedom, and you will succeed. Because your desire to be free of it is the main thing that will take you there. You may feel powerless to stop, but your desire to stop is very powerful, even if it seems small to you. It will eventually triumph as surely as day follows night. It may seem like you have made no progress toward stopping, but that is not the case. You have to learn how to deal with the things we've discussed. Perhaps most importantly, you need to be able to banish fear enough to keep on trying. Don't stop stopping until you've stopped for good.