Letter to the Editor of The Times regarding “Addicted To Failure”, August 24

Letter to the Editor from John Dicey, Worldwide Director of Allen Carr’s Easyway –

Sir, I applaud the clarity with which you address successive governments’ flawed approach to treating addiction by leaving addicts “parked on methadone” (“Addicted To Failure”, Leading Articles, August 24)

Indeed I pray that the rest of the UK media also begin to rumble this ruse which touches many parts of addiction treatment. The UK Government’s approach to smoking cessation, driven by a prescription obsessed medical and scientific establishment, has focused almost entirely on attempting to cure addiction to nicotine by prescribing nicotine. Allen Carr paid a heavy price for highlighting this “Emperor’s Clothes” style folly many years ago by being ignored, attacked, and insulted by the very medical and scientific establishment which is now forced to admit its costly failure. A cost counted in not only hundreds of millions of pounds of tax payers money, but in tens of thousands of lives which might otherwise have been saved had an effective means of quitting been provided.

The scandal doesn’t end here. The same medical and scientific establishment that insisted on smoking cessation aids which are not only ineffective but also (and oh – what irony) addictive, now insist that the best course of action is to prescribe nicotine replacement products permanently as part of a new “harm reduction” objective rather than a means of curing the addiction. This about-turn would be “Pythonesque” were it not so alarming.

Although their policy of using NRT for the last decade or more has failed – the same people, using the same weird, flawed science are set to pursue an equally crazy course of action.

Can you imagine how happy the pharmaceutical industry will be at this news? They no longer have to finance studies that seem to prove nicotine patches and gum cure smoking – the medical and scientific establishment are on the verge of having nicotine addicts permanently prescribed nicotine…. for the rest of their lives. It’s enough to make one wonder who it is that drives opinion and policy amongst the medical and scientific establishment in this country.

How much more simple might it to be to utilise the skills and knowledge that has made Britain’s Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking method a global smoking cessation phenomenon? It’s about time that the lunatics relinquished control of the asylum and someone who knows what they are doing was put in charge!

John Dicey
Worldwide Director
Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking