Allen Carr

Allen Carr smoked as many as a hundred cigarettes a day for thirty-three years before a session of hypnotherapy in July 1983 left him convinced that nothing physical was holding him there, only nicotine addiction and the dread of doing without it. He was forty-eight, and an accountant by trade, qualified in 1958, with no medical or psychological training whatever. That is worth stating plainly, because The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, published in 1985, argues from his own case rather than from trial data, working on the smoker's belief that the cigarette delivers pleasure or relief and asking the reader to keep smoking until the final page. Carr opened his first Easyway clinic the same year he quit and grew it into a fee-charging network of more than two hundred clinics in about fifty countries, so the book is also the front door to a business. Born in Putney, London, on 2 September 1934, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006 and died that November at Benalmádena in Spain, aged seventy-two.