TOBACCO IS AN ILLUSION New Yorker cartoonist Drew Dernavich created this poster during Bob Fellows' presentation on tobacco prevention to youth in Pennsylvania. Bob had shown a video of his performance of Houdini's Water Torture Cell and motivated students to have greater respect for their lungs, their health, and the control of their own minds. Below is an essay that Robert Fellows wrote on his philosophy of tobacco use. He speaks about this in his presentations titled "Mind Over Manipulation," "The Illusion of Tobacco," and "High Level Wellness."

In addition to strengthening your heart and extending your life expectancy and enjoyment, aerobic exercise helps you to keep your lungs healthy.

Another way to keep your lungs healthy is to avoid toxins. There are pollutants in the air we can try to avoid, but many men still “voluntarily” inhale the single worst pollutant for the lungs.

In the United States, approximately 1 in 4 men die of cancer. A third of those cancers are lung cancer. Nearly 90% of all deaths from lung cancer are a result of smoking.

Perhaps because men started quitting smoking before women did, a smaller percentage of men are dying from lung cancer than women. In recent years, the death rate due to lung cancer among men has been decreasing, but to continue this trend we need to educate young people about the dangers of tobacco.

The illusion of tobacco is that it appears to have value, when in fact it has none. If you look around and see people smoking all day long, standing outside buildings taking time from their day to have a cigarette, getting together in groups to smoke, and missing their cigarettes greatly when they aren’t allowed to smoke on planes or in restaurants, you would think that smoking must be highly pleasurable. In tobacco advertisements, smoking is sometimes associated with the clean mentholated air of beaches and streams and trim-looking models having a good time. Even in smoking cessation literature, we are sometimes told that it is difficult to give up smoking because smoking “gives us pleasure” and “reduces our stress.” We conclude that smoking must be a highly pleasurable activity!

In fact, this is an illusion because smoking is, in fact, not pleasurable. It actually gives the smoker nothing of value. What it really does is take something away, then it seems to give some of it back in the form of increased heart rate, breath rate, and blood pressure, creating the illusion of a lift. If you’re a smoker, imagine that there’s a cigarette inside you that wants to smoke. That’s the nicotine telling you it wants more nicotine in your system. It is a strong physical addiction.

The first cigarette that one smokes disrupts the mood of a normal, healthy non-smoker. Further cigarettes simply put more nicotine into the bloodstream and brain of the smoker. As that nicotine becomes depleted, the smoker experiences a low feeling—below the normal level of a healthy non-smoker. It creates a physical craving that can also become a psychological craving. The nicotine in each cigarette increases the heart rate, breath rate, and blood pressure temporarily, and thereby creates the illusion of relief. However, the mood never gets back up to the normal level of the healthy non-smoker. The only way to get back up to that level is to get all the nicotine out of your system—a process that can take 3 to 5 weeks.

The only way to escape the cycle of addiction is to first understand and accept that tobacco is not pleasurable, it doesn’t give you a lift, it’s expensive in more ways than one, it causes 90% of all lung cancers, and it contributes to the severity of other diseases. Once you accept that, then quit and never smoke again.

If you are a smoker, you might want to read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking, published in 1999 by Barnes & Noble. When you’re ready to quit smoking, be prepared for several difficult weeks as your body clears itself out. Your body will be purging itself of the drug nicotine. Maintain a positive attitude about how much better your life is going to be, and then experience the pure joy of clean air, smooth running, and greater peace of mind!