Up in smoke

National No Smoking Day; the day we used to be told all smokers decided to quit smoking. Of course – Allen Carr used to crack a wry smile every time it was ever mentioned because he knew it was the one day in the year when most self-respecting smokers were least likely to make an attempt to stop. In fact many smokers would smoke twice as many cigarettes as normal in defiance of being told what to do and when to do it by a bunch of do-gooders.

Having said all that, over the years, National No Smoking Day at least presented an opportunity to have Allen Carr’s Easyway mentioned in the media – especially newspapers and magazines. To this end – we would always play an active role in the day’s proceedings in the hope that at least the smoking public might get an opportunity to learn a little about Allen Carr’s Easyway as a result. To do anything other than that would have been to surrender those media opportunities to the stop smoking quacks and the peddlers of nicotine patches, nicotine gum, Zyban, and Champix.

The fact that Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking always more than matched Big Pharma, punch for punch, blow for blow, in the fight for column inches in this annual media scuffle was testimony to Allen’s truly amazing method, the dedication, hard work, and ingenuity of the team he assembled to support his work, and the most important part of Allen Carr’s Easyway revolution – the happy non-smokers it produced – who would happily sing its praises until the cows came home. It remains true even today – most people who use the method do so as a result of personal recommendation from someone who has used it successfully themselves. We remain eternally grateful to the support of those people.

Whisper it quietly – but something is very much awry with National No Smoking Day. For the second year running, the event, certainly in the print media, was…well….a non-event. Of the dozen or so national newspapers we scanned this week only one featured a stop smoking story.

In contrast to the stark lack of editorial coverage of smoking related topics, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Express, and The Daily Star all carried a whole host of adverts for e-cigarettes and other “nicotine delivery devices”. The “Ad Men” are certainly relishing the event.

The only consolation following the second “wipe-out” stop smoking day in succession is that if the many millions of pounds being pumped into the promotion of NHS Stop Smoking Services and a whole array of nicotine products failed to secure any editorial column inches – Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking was always going to struggle to succeed where they failed.

Having said that, the book received a fabulous accolade in The Mirror newspaper – as the NUMBER ONEstop smoking book and we’ve been extra busy in the realms of Social Media… with well over 23,000 “likes” on www.facebook.com/AllenCarr versus a few thousand on www.facebook.com/NoSmokingDay it’s still pretty much –
David (well Allen actually) 1 Goliath 0

To buy Allen Carr’s Easyway books or app click here