“I think, originally, he thought that the conversation we just had would do it.
It was all based on what, to him, was a profound revelation: that they didn’t actually like smoking. So it’s that kind of illusion of relief.” The ‘Easy Way’ evolvesĬarr started small - sharing the “good news” of how he’d quit with other smokers at the pub. It wasn’t there before the drug was taken. When the addict takes the next shot, the uncomfortable feeling goes. Once the drug starts leaving the body, that’s an uncomfortable feeling. “The addiction creates a feeling of withdrawal. “The existence of pleasure doesn’t play a big part in addiction,” Dicey said.
It was all about seeing through a kind of illusion. You didn’t so much “quit” cigarettes, as gain freedom from them. “The whole principle of addiction is it messes up your understanding of pleasure, enjoyment.”Ĭarr figured if you understood that, you could understand that giving up smoking wasn’t really giving up anything at all. “It’s still a hurdle for smokers to get over because a lot of people think to be addicted to something, you have to like it, and that’s simply not the case,” Dicey said. It planted a seed that would become the basis for Carr’s Easy Way, a notion that sounds deceptively simple: Smokers smoke because they’re addicted to smoking, not because they enjoy smoking. This was back in the ‘80s, Dicey explained, when the label addict was more reserved for hard drugs, like heroin.īut something about that realization - that he was well and truly addicted to cigarettes - flipped a switch in Carr. He saw a hypnotherapist (who failed to hypnotize him), but it was at his appointment that Carr first heard the idea that smoking was an addiction - and he was an addict. Before the Easy Way, he was an accountant and, like Dicey, a heavy smoker who wanted to stop. “He’s described himself as a street urchin.”Ĭarr had zero medical background, and no psychology or addiction training. He was born and brought up in what was at the time a down-at-heel area of London,” Dicey said. After all, who just conjures up a stop-smoking method, essentially out of nowhere, and goes on to sell 50 million people on it? I talked to Dicey hoping to find out what kind of guy Carr was. He asked Carr for a job helping to expand the Easy Way, and he got it.ĭicey would ultimately spend years working alongside Allen Carr, who died in 2006. And he wanted to be a part of this, whatever it was, that had just saved him.ĭicey was a successful businessman at the time, running catering and hospitality outfits. It’s supposed to be easy and for Dicey, it was.Īfter years of struggling to go two solid hours without a smoke, he walked out of the seminar, done with cigarettes - completely and for good. Somehow, after all the talking and smoking, you’re meant to put out your final cigarette and never take another puff. “Everybody would step outside every 45 to 60 minutes for a smoke break.” “These days, we take smoking breaks because of smoking bans,” Dicey said. The sessions were meant to be one-and-done, and the whole thing took five or six hours. All practitioners had to be ex-smokers themselves, cured by the Easy Way. A practitioner would be up front, explaining why they didn’t actually like smoking, and why quitting was no big deal. The smokers would all sit around in armchairs, puffing away in some conference room.
“So as soon as you walk through the door, it’s just this thick fog.” “Back in the day, everyone smoked throughout the seminar,” he said. “I was once very lucky to meet David Bowie, and he had exactly the same effect.”ĭicey is an executive at Allen Carr’s Easyway, the company behind the best-selling stop smoking books and seminars.īefore meeting the man himself, Dicey first met one of Carr’s stop-smoking practitioners at an Easy Way seminar in London, where the method started. “If you’re lucky enough to meet the person who saved your life, it’s an overwhelming feeling,” Dicey said. So for him, meeting Allen Carr was a bit like meeting a rock star, if that rock star that had just miraculously cured him of a terminal illness. In the ‘90s, John Dicey was smoking himself to death - 80 cigarettes a day, or four American packs. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
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