Medicine: How to Stop Smoking

The best way to stop smoking is to stop smoking, says Scottish Doctor Lennox Johnston. The procedure, he insists, is neither as simple nor as simple-minded as it sounds. The craving for tobacco must be understood and the dangers of nicotine appreciated before mere will power can separate a man from his pipe or his cigarettes. But it can be done. In the latest issue of the British medical journal Lancet, Johnston, a reformed smoker, tells all.

The original urge, says the doctor, is purely psychological, closely connected with the desire to be grown-up or sophisticated. This psychological “infection” is then spread by other smokers. “Every smoker is, in fact, whether he wills it or not, a living advertisement for tobacco, and there are so many smokers today, and they smoke and speak encouragement to smoke so often, that the persuasive pressure on non-smokers to commence or recommence smoking is powerful indeed. To this must be added the lavish scientific advertising of the tobacco combines.”

Soon the psychological urge is reinforced by a pharmacological urge—the true physical craving for tobacco. As time passes, tobacco becomes “a general analgesic against life’s little, or even big, stresses and vexations.”

The smoker who wants to reform, says Dr. Johnston, should be frightened by threats of lung cancer. He must understand that “tobacco smoke contains various poisons, notably nicotine, pyridine bases, carbon monoxide and arsenic . . .”

The most trying period, Dr. Johnston reports, is the first day and night without tobacco. Since respiratory infections reduce the urge to smoke, a man might wait until he catches cold before he begins the agony of withdrawal. Or he might try a last night of overindulgence. Too much smoking can bring on a helpful sore throat.

However he goes about his cure, the addict who finally gives up tobacco will recognize “an accession of high spirits, energy, appetite and sexual potency, with recession of coughing.”

But Dr. Johnston expects to see few reformed smokers until doctors themselves wake up to tobacco’s dangers. “About 80% of us are smokers,” he estimates sadly, “and we behave collectively like an addict . . . Radical cure of tobacco smoking lies in its prevention and tobacco smoking is no more difficult to prevent than opium smoking. Our duty is plain.”