“I’ve achieved some marvelous things in my life,” Carr said in the introduction of his book, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking *. “By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of nicotine addiction.”
Carr was an accountant in London, England, but was totally addicted to cigarettes: he smoked five packs a day. He tried to quit but couldn’t — until 1983, he said, when he developed his “Easy Way” method, which he claims has a greater than 50 percent success rate after one year, far higher than typical programs. In addition to quitting smoking, he quit his accounting job and went full-time into helping others quit. No one would publish his book on the topic, so he published it himself — and it sold 7 million copies.
He was aghast at government-run smoking cessation programs that used fear tactics and, worse, didn’t work as well as his program: “Can you imagine if there were ten different ways of treating appendicitis?” he wrote. “Nine of them cured 10 percent of the patients, which means that they killed 90 percent of them, and the tenth way cured 95 percent. Imagine that knowledge of the tenth way had been available for 14 years, but the vast majority of the medical establishment was still recommending the other nine.”
Carr hadn’t smoked for 23 years but allowed patients in his clinic to smoke, exposing him to smoke nearly every day. He ended up with lung cancer, but said it was a “reasonable price to pay” for helping millions to quit. Still, the British government still won’t even try his method in NHS clinics. Carr died from his cancer on November 29. He was 72.
Update: In 2015, TobaccoFree Research Institute Ireland finally did a study of the effectiveness of Carr’s method, which was published in the British Medical Journal in 2018. They didn’t just want to know if people left the treatment as non-smokers, they wanted to know if it stuck, so they followed up with the research subjects after 1, 3, 6, and 12 months to find out.
Their conclusion: “All AC quit rates were superior to Quit.ie,” the Irish government’s mental health service’s official program. “At each visit, the quit rate in the AC group is significantly greater than that of the Quit.ie group.” It was the first properly controlled “randomised clinical trial” of Carr’s system. You can read the study report (note: heavy with research jargon “Intended for healthcare professionals”) here, or just get Carr’s book at the link above.