Mary Killen takes a deep breath and tries the method that’s long been fail-safe for cigarette addicts.
When I first began vaping two years ago, I was thrilled with my new habit. I enthusiastically shared with friends, “Twenty times a day I crave something, and twenty times a day I satisfy that craving. It’s just like smoking, minus the danger and grossness.”
However, I soon wanted to quit. My daily sessions increased from 20 to 40, and then to 160. Running out of cartridges made me irritable and unfocused until I replenished my supply. The habit was costing me about £20 a week, and lines resembling barcodes began to form between my lips and nose.
Residential rehab for vaping doesn’t exist, and I didn’t fancy turning into a monster in front of my family by detoxing at home.
I then remembered Allen Carr, an accountant turned anti-smoking guru who once smoked up to 100 cigarettes a day. Though he passed away in 2006 at age 72 from lung cancer, he had unraveled a method to overcome addiction before his demise. In 1983, at 48, Carr left accountancy to dedicate himself to teaching others his Easyway method.
Carr helped thousands quit through his one-day seminars and sold millions of books detailing his techniques. He left a legacy of clinics dedicated to helping people stop smoking—and now vaping. So why hadn’t I tried one myself?
My own one-day session was priced at £379, complete with a money-back guarantee if I failed to quit. Skeptical due to my penchant for constant little treats, I decided to attend the Allen Carr headquarters in Raynes Park, South London. I wanted to demonstrate my commitment by participating in the 10am-5pm course that Monday.
Upon arriving, I admitted at reception that I shamefully needed a quick vape before starting. “Join the others outside,” the receptionist encouraged with a smile, guiding me to the garden, where five women and four men were puffing away.
‘If I ran out of cartridges I would feel irritable and unable to concentrate until I got some more,’ writes Mary Killen
Allen Carr smoked up to 100 cigarettes a day before dying of lung cancer in 2006 at 72 years old
I loved the ‘back to school’ vibe immediately – and the classroom, a bright, cosy space with a view, through Venetian blinds, of trees in the park. We lolled in super-comfortable reclining chairs as our teacher began to educate us. OMG, this would be worth it for the social and nostalgia payload, even if I didn’t quit vaping.
Our teacher, Colleen, told us she would talk for 50 minutes and then we could go downstairs to smoke and vape again. Relieved, we reclined and began listening.
She began by making very cogent points about our addiction. As children we hadn’t needed nicotine to be happy. Nicotine was not relieving our stress, it was creating it by causing the need for the relief in the first place. She talked about her life as a smoker, how she had made cigarettes her priority, even during weddings, funerals and school prize days.
Her cigarettes meant the world to her and yet one day she quit. And when she looked back, she saw that the cigarettes had taken much more from her than they had given.
It had all been a tender trap and the big tobacco companies had tricked her into it, just as they were tricking us. ‘Because they want what’s in your wallets!’
At this point one of the attendees turned whistleblower. Confessing that she worked for a big tobacco company, she explained how, in despair that they were going to lose access to our wallets if we escaped their enslavement, they were devising new methods of trapping us – with Snüs, those nicotine-impregnated pellets we can hide in our gums that slowly leak nicotine into our systems over the course of a day. Some of them, said the whistleblower, contain as much nicotine as 20 cigarettes. They are being given out free at railway stations in the hope of getting a fresh generation hooked – you can have them in your mouth in the classroom or office and no one will know.
When 50 minutes were up, we headed to the garden and vaped and smoked, but less frantically than before, and faster – we were keen to head back for more revelations. The day passed. Colleen was a very attractive woman with good posture, and she held our attention. Her delivery could not have been faulted. Every word she said was carefully chosen, her narratives were gripping, she never lost stamina – in short, she was a brilliant actress, and I would wager she actually was an actress. How else could you perform the same spiel day after day?
Experts have recently warned of the risk to children’s brain development from vaping
The course finished with a 40-minute hypnotherapy session conducted by Colleen, and I have no memory of what happened within it. The ten of us just lay back, eyes shut, in our recliners. All I know is that, three weeks on, I have not vaped, or even wanted to. The key points that lodged in my head were how wonderful it would be to be free, like we were as children, and how our need for nicotine had not been a choice but a trap.
Now I know to respond to the urge by brushing it aside, as if it were fluff on my coat. I’m concentrating on starving the ‘evil tapeworm’ in my body to death. I have stuffed myself with chewing gum and Fisherman’s Friends but I have not vaped. Reader, I don’t want to.
