I often get asked about this matter. Even the local fire department has asked me on occasion to give advice to those smokers, who, because of regulations imposed by non-smokers were going to have to smoke outside, in a Chicago winter, if they wanted a cigarette.

My approach to this matter is based on my smoking pipe, and up to three packs of British navy cigarettes a day, and sometimes rolling my own from cigar tobacco. I am not one of those holier than thou non-smokers who accuse the smoker- of lack of will power and try to frighten them into stopping. Because unlike the never-having-smoked I know how it starts and what goes on inside.

When I was introduced to the 'obligatory attendance' audience of sinners who smoked at the fire department, the lady introducing me said: "This is Dr. Buchanan who is a chemistry specialist and he is going to tell you what happens to your lungs when you smoke."

That of course was an assumption based on her knowledge of my scientific background, and on what to her was the only conceivable method of coercing people to stop smoking.

My opening statement stunned the stage panel and awakened the sinners, who all perceptibly straightened up and leaned forward. I said: " With all due deference to our honourable chairwoman I am going to do nothing of the sort. All of you are already sick to death of hearing about such things from non-smokers. And you know they have no effect whatever on your smoking, except to make you feel guilty about it. What you want to know is how to stop doing it, and it’s not likely that someone who never has done it will have any idea of what smoking means to you. I was a heavy smoker, and stopped, and have helped other people stop. My experience may be helpful to you, and my approach to the problem will certainly be helpful. So, attend carefully." They did.

Then I went on to describe how it starts and what it means, and how to stop it. The gist of what I said, with speaker’s jokes and asides left out, where possible, is here.

The first thing to do is to establish that nobody in the room was born with a cigarette in their mouth. This fundamental fact is often missed by the preachers of purity. EVERYBODY was a non-smoker to start with.

And the second thing to do is to get rid of the sweet talk avoidance that we use to describe what we do. I used to have my querents light up a cigarette, and then I would ask, "What are you doing?" All of them would say "I’m smoking a cigarette." Then I would suggest that they use more exact language, like "I am inhaling the fumes of burning vegetation." Unless you see something as it is you can’t fix it. Dealing with a verbal fiction is how the Pentagon makes issues invisible…pre-emptive strikes, and collateral damage, for instance.

Now that is established we can make some progress. Everyone here started as a non-smoker. It’s no big deal to be a non-smoker. Everybody was. There is no reason for them to adopt a holier than thou attitude. (Prolonged applause) And I can assure you, if you are now an unwilling smoker, that it took much more will power to start smoking than it does to stop. Because it isn’t a matter of will power at all, except in the mind of the life long non-smoker, who is dealing in mental concepts, not life experience.

You remember how your so-sensible body tried to point out to you that you were not doing an optimum thing. You threw up behind the tool shed, and hoped in vain to die, with your skin a pale green, at least once, because of the nausea you experienced. But it was your will that kept you going through all the misery until the body got this message: This action is very important. It is a matter of survival. Then your body stopped its violent objections. Common speech would say, It got used to it. Close but no cigar.(Groans) It reorganized its internal survival priorities. It got used to its error.

And of course it was a matter of survival as interpreted probably by a teenager. You smoked to be like everybody else, or to join a peer group, or to rebel. And in that sense it was a survival activity. Because of this programming that you did yourself, your alert subconscious treats any criticism of your smoking by another as an attack on your survival. Your helpful subconscious has it labeled as such and ANY frontal attack of your smoking is just teflonned off by your survival mechanism.

The pictures of rotting lungs and emphysema patients shown to you by the helpful, are terrifying to them, but not to you. They may cause you a momentary discomfort but affect not at all the fact that you smoke. It may not taste all that good but your body knows the program that smoking means survival, so you keep doing it.

In your subconscious there is no time. This is why forty year old men can act like two year olds when the proper button is pushed. And your program is established, and has no natural termination point because the initialization point wasn’t natural either.

Previous to my address another speaker had asked members of the audience how many cigarettes they had smoked in the last couple of days.Warm fuzzies and tut-tuts were distributed according to the numbers reported.

I attacked that method as missing the whole point of what people were trying to do. The would-be helpers had not seen that the ultimate end of a successful campaign was not to stop an activity, in this case smoking, but to give the smoker a new mind…the mind of a non-smoker. I suggested that none of the non-smokers sitting behind me had given a moment’s thought in the last two days on how many cigarettes they hadn’t smoked, and that this mental attitude was the goal, not cutting down numbers of cigarettes smoked, which was just another way of focusing on cigarettes.

But to attain that goal, the mind of a non-smoker, the carefully inserted survival program had to be circumvented in some way. Direct attack doesn’t work. Will power doesn’t usually work either, because will power, assisted by strong emotions established the program in the first place.

So I gave a few examples of methods that worked. Some of them helped the listeners immensely according to later reports. Here they are.

I was for some time a Pure and Applied mathematics teacher in a co-educational boarding school in Britain. Most of the students were the children of continually traveling professionals like diplomats and oil explorers, and they stayed at school all the time, except during the school holidays, the only times some of them saw their parents at all during the year.

Since the teachers too lived in houses on the school campus they each had social assignments other than the academic ones. Apart from being the mathematics specialist, my job was to hold the post of pastoral care, as it it was called. It was a Quaker school founded around 1720, hence the term.

This means I had to counsel and help, advise, empathize with and discipline the boys in the school, and be as much a mentor/Elder to them as possible. This was therefore a 24/7 job. My study was always available for any boy in the school who thought I might be able to help him in any way, on any matter that bothered boys of the ages 11 through 18.

One afternoon there was a knock on the door and in came one of the seniors. "Excuse me sir," he said, " I have a problem and I think you will know what to do about it."

At that moment I was finishing a Players Medium Navy cut cigarette, so I stubbed it out in the ash-tray and settled down to focus. "What’s the problem, Berry?"(not his actual name)

"It’s my half-mile. I’m losing time on it recently and I think it’s because I’m smoking too much. Will you show me how to stop smoking?"

Now Berry knew that I smoked. I was smoking (inhaling fumes of burning vegetation) when he came in. But he thought that probably I did so because I wanted to, not because I had to. So there was no contradiction for him in asking his more experienced mentor how to stop.

But up to that time I had never ever considered not smoking, and hadn’t given it the thought I gave it later. So I went into my inner state where I knew all the answers were and said silently, "Show me." And an answer immediately appeared. This is what happened.

"Yes, Berry, I can show you how to stop smoking. It’s pretty easy for a young man. I can tell you what to do, and if you are willing after I’ve told you, then you must promise to obey the rules of the method 100%."

In those days, in the early 60’s, a gentleman’s jewelry included his rings, watch, tie tacks and cigarette case, and people spent fortunes on silver, gold and platinum cases, with engravings and sometimes built in lighters too. I had a very finely engraved, antique silver case which I took from my pocket.

"What do you smoke Berry?" "Players Medium or Passing Cloud sir."

So I filled the case with Players Medium. It held twenty.

"Here are the rules Berry. You take my case with you. You are only to smoke cigarettes from this case. You neither accept nor give cigarettes to others. If you need the case refilled at any time just knock on the door and I’ll fill it for you. You can smoke whenever you like, on this condition. Only light up when you have at least a quarter of an hour to spare. When you smoke the cigarette, do nothing else. Focus on it. Become totally aware of the taste, of the smoke rings, of the sounds it makes as it burns. Be completely conscious of smoking the cigarette. When you need a refill or want to report what’s going on, just knock on the door."

"Well, I’ll do all that sir, but I don’t see how that is going to help."

"Berry, did you ever light a cigarette and suddenly realize there is one still burning on an ashtray that you had put down for a second and forgotten?" Of course he had. "The reason you are smoking too much Berry, is because you are not smoking the cigarettes, they are smoking you. When you consciously smoke every one all the way down, experiencing it as much as possible, then you are smoking the cigarette. That’s where we have to start. You may have never actually smoked a cigarette consciously before. Off you go."

That was Friday. On Monday afternoon in the break period there was a knock on the door and in came Berry.

"Refill Berry?" "No sir. I’ve stopped smoking. I won’t have to do it any more. Here’s your case back and thank you."

There were twelve cigarettes in the case. So I asked him what happened to bring about this new condition. He told me how he had once or twice almost taken a cigarette for a quick puff, but remembered his promise and waited for a decent break. He found that he only smoked five up to the end of Saturday. He realized that he had in fact never, ever smoked a cigarette before. He had two on Sunday and realized that he didn’t even like cigarettes, now he was smoking them, instead of the other way around. On Monday he opened the case, looked at the cigarettes, reluctantly smoked one through, according to our contract, and quit. And for the rest of the school year he didn’t smoke, and yes, his time for the half-mile improved.

So, the first thing to do is to smoke consciously following the Berry rules. Quite a few folks have realized that they really enjoy smoking consciously and they don’t have to keep on and on like a chain smoker, being smoked by the cigarettes. When a pack lasts them two or three days, or longer, they realize that they don’t have a bad smoking problem any more. It’s something they like doing, not a body destroying addiction as it was when the cigarette smoked them. The Berry system has been very successful with people who have not been persuaded that their habit is a vice, or a criminal act rather than a preference.

It’s feeling guilty about it that makes the physical effects worse. George Burns smoked cigars until he was a hundred years old. But he didn’t fret about it. Winston Churchill was talking to Bernard Shaw who pointed out that he was a vegetarian, didn’t smoke and didn’t drink and was 100% fit. Winston replied that he ate meat every day, drank a bottle of whisky every day, chain smoked Havanas, and was 150% fit. Lots of people smoke into their nineties, but they don’t feel guilty about it. Their attitude helps their body cope. If you feel bad about smoking then it’s time to check on ways to deal with the habit. Your guilt trip may be what’s killing you.

What about getting to the original program and shutting it off? Many people try to do this with affirmations. They attack the program by saying things like, "I don’t smoke any more." several hundred times a day. Their affirmation hits the survival defence and evaporates. Direct attack doesn’t work. So, what to do?

Start your affirmation with the magic words, " I am willing…" Whenever you say " I " the subconscious goes into alert mode. Whenever people say " I can’t do that," or "I’m no good at math" or whatever, they are programming themselves to cut out valuable options and skills. But any programs put in by using the "I" word can be circumvented by using the more powerful words, "I am willing…"

A very powerful affirmation is " I am willing to change for the better, and I enjoy watching it happen." It’s always best to have a positive emotion involved. This one has been found useful with people who have accepted the opinions of others that the very act of smoking makes them a lesser person. People who get the knack of using the negative to trigger the positive often find this one works well. Every time they light up they say the magic words. Smoking and drinking and compulsive spending and other security habits are attacked at the base.

Saying it a few hundred times a day, particularly at night and early morning tends to alter the way the person views the world and himself or herself. Positive possibilities that were there all the time but never before noticed become obvious. The feeling of an expanding and friendly universe alters the little black box in the head that interprets the reports of the senses. Life gets better, and the better it gets the less is the hold on the basic psyche of non-optimum behaviors.

We all make our world with our thoughts, and experience it with the master plan of our attitude, which was made up of our thoughts or the thoughts of others in the form of words. This is so true that using cigarettes to trigger non-smoking works in many cases. This is a case of using the old ‘survival’ action to initiate a new program.

It goes like this. EVERY time the would be non-smoker lights up, the old survival program is acknowledged, and the subconscious relaxes. And then EVERY time the smoker lights the cigarette he or she says, "I am a non-smoker." Doing this EVERY time connects the old survival action to the new thought in a way that offsets the automatic negation that would happen if the smoker was saying it without smoking.

After a time, surprisingly short in some instances, the subconscious accepts the new program and says to the smoker…"Hey! Do you realize you are holding something in your hand that’s burning?" The smoker throws it away as a survival action and doesn’t need to smoke again.

A great help with many folks is taking good doses of vitamin B complex to offset the feelings of physiological inadequacy that often occur as the nicotine leaves the body from its storage places in the fat.

The ALL or NOTHING people are apparently in a vast majority in this country. There aren’t any words in the common language for people who act moderately. As a health writer I have researched the positive effect of very small amounts of nicotine on muscle tone. Because of my research, which I don’t feel impelled to tell the world, I smoke ONE cigarette a day, when the weather is fine. I never smoke it indoors or when the weather is wet or cold.. I treat it as an intermittent health supplement, and only use cigarettes that contain organic or unadulterated tobacco, not the widely advertised, paper wrapped chemical mixtures sold today.

So, what am I? Am I a smoker, or a non-smoker? The fundamentalist approach to smoking as a sin must label me as a smoker. The three pack a day man says "Call yourself a smoker? Get real!"

You see the dilemma. People accept the labels of others without examining the philosophy or the programming that produced the label. Who says you are a smoker?

Every now and again I drink one small glass of cheap red wine, also as a supplement. Am I a drinker? This matter of being labeled is very important. Make up your own labels for yourself. Don’t accept unthinkingly the labels of others. Their labels are programs that can give you trouble.

And don’t ever try to GIVE UP smoking. The very words GIVE UP are a no-no in a competitive society and are often automatically rejected by the subconscious of the one wanting change. Use REPLACE and have something like health, stamina or whatever to replace the unwanted thing. I have met many very large people who will never get slimmer as long as they say they are trying to LOSE weight. The American subconscious rebels against the word ‘ lose.’ and all its derivatives. Use other words and make things easier for yourself. As my red headed, streghe sister says, "Stalk your words."

And remember too what I told the fire department, some of whom had tears rolling down their faces because I was obviously on their side and non-judgmental of them. You work at whatever method you use. Listen to nobody else but yourself, and one day you will know that you now have a choice. Then, in that one day you can replace smoking with some other activity. You will have the mind of a non-smoker, but not the prejudices.

Happy Trails on whatever ways you want to go,

Douglas