Switch Down & Quit: What the Cigarette Companies Don't Want You to Know About Smoking

By Dolly D. Gahagan

Discusses tobacco industry standards, suggests a way to stop smoking by switching to brands with less nicotine, and lists the dangers of smoking.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898152046
• ISBN13: 9780898152043
• Release Date: May 1987
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Length: 123 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Great Help

This is an old book but still holds true. I read the book several years ago and was able to stop smoking since then (approx. 12 years ago). I recommend it highly.

Excellent Quit-Smoking Plan

This book helped me kick the habit 18 years ago and I've recommended it to countless others. The easy program slowly reduces your tar & nicotine intake so that at the "target date" you have a minimal addiction withdrawal. Kudos to the authors.

Finally, a method that worked (at least for me)

This is probably the most common-sense approach to quitting the nicotine habit that I have ever seen. After smoking over a pack a day for twenty-five years and trying to quit countless times, I used this method. It worked. Fifteen years later, I'm still smoke free. In a nutshell, the method consists of switching brands of cigarettes every three weeks or so, going to a lower tar and nicotine content each time. For the first few days, I compensated by smoking more cigarettes, but eventually I went back to your previous level of consumption. At the point where I felt that I was steady again, I repeated the process. It worked because there are two components to a smoking habit: the nicotine addiction, and the psychological behavior construct (aka "doing something with my hands"). If you can reduce the effect of one component, you have a good chance of overcoming the other one. I'm not going to sugar-coat it. I still had to go cold turkey eventually, but I found to my surprise that this time, I could do it; I was consuming a fraction of tar and nicotine by this time, and I wasn't climbing the walls the way I had been in previous attempts to quit. I'm not going to claim that this method will work for you, only that it worked for me. And it did it without drugs, patches, expensive therapy, or exotic treatments like hypnosis or electroshock or Scientology. It's worth a try.