Ray Washington: Allen Carr’s Book Plus Patches Got Me Free After 32 Years

I’ve been told by at least four people that you’re not supposed to use nicotine patches while doing the Allen Carr method. Allen Carr himself says in his book that you shouldn’t use any nicotine replacement. He says the whole point is to understand that you don’t need the nicotine, and that using patches perpetuates the dependency. I respect that. I understand the logic. And I’m telling you that I combined them anyway, and it worked, and I don’t care if the purists on both sides think I did it wrong.

My name is Ray Washington. I’m fifty-five. I live in Washington, DC, in the Brookland neighborhood in the northeast quadrant. I’ve worked for the federal government for twenty-seven years, currently as a GS-13 program analyst at the Department of Education. I smoked Newport menthols for thirty-two years, and I quit nineteen months ago using a dog-eared copy of “Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking” and a box of Nicoderm CQ patches, and I’m not apologizing for either one.

Thirty-Two Years

I grew up in Southeast DC, in the Anacostia neighborhood, in a family where smoking was as common as eating dinner. My mother smoked Newports. My older sister Denise smoked Newports. When I was twenty-three and working my first government job, a GS-5 clerk at the Department of Agriculture, I started smoking Newports because the brand was already in my blood. I didn’t make a decision. I just fell into it the way you fall into a cold pool: one minute you’re standing on the edge, the next you’re in.

A pack a day by twenty-five. A pack and a half during stressful periods, which in federal government work means budget season, audit season, and election years, so roughly always. I smoked on my lunch break outside the L’Enfant Plaza building. I smoked on the walk from the Metro station. I smoked on my back steps in Brookland while my wife, Patricia, pretended not to notice from the kitchen window. I smoked after church on Sundays, stepping away from the congregation at Providence Baptist to stand behind the parking lot fence with the other sinners.

The money was significant. In DC, Newports ran about $12 a pack by the end. At a pack a day, that’s $360 a month, $4,320 a year. Over thirty-two years, even adjusting for lower prices in the earlier decades, I estimate I spent somewhere north of $90,000 on cigarettes. That’s a college education for my son, Terrell. That’s a down payment on a house in a better neighborhood. That’s money I set on fire, literally, while it poisoned me.

The Failures

Five attempts in thirty-two years. Each one taught me something I didn’t want to learn.

Attempt one, age twenty-nine: cold turkey. Four days of misery. Headaches, constipation, insomnia, and an anger that sat on my chest like a stone. I yelled at a coworker over a stapler that was out of staples. A stapler. Back to Newports on day five.

Attempt two, age thirty-four: Zyban prescription from my doctor at Howard University Hospital. The medication made me jittery and killed my appetite, which I didn’t mind at first. But after three weeks, I was losing weight too fast and feeling wired all the time, and my doctor suggested I stop. I smoked a Newport within hours of my last Zyban pill.

Attempt three, age thirty-eight: Nicorette gum, 4mg. I used it faithfully for a month. Then I went through a contentious situation at work involving a reorganization that threatened my position, and I was stress-smoking before the ink was dry on the org chart. The gum couldn’t compete with institutional anxiety.

Attempt four, age forty-three: Chantix. This was the most successful pre-attempt. Chantix reduced my desire to smoke significantly. I made it six weeks. Then I went to a family reunion in Richmond and every single person on my father’s side of the family was smoking, and the combination of Hennessy and social pressure and cousins handing me cigarettes broke through whatever wall the Chantix had built. I stopped taking the medication after the reunion and didn’t bother restarting.

Attempt five, age forty-nine: vaping. JUUL device, 5% nicotine pods. I switched entirely for about three months, which felt like success at the time. But I was consuming more nicotine than ever, hitting the JUUL every few minutes, and when JUUL pulled their flavored pods from the market, I went back to Newports rather than switch to the tobacco-flavored pods that tasted like cardboard.

Five attempts, five failures. By fifty, I’d made peace with being a lifetime smoker. Patricia had stopped asking me to quit. Terrell, who was in college, had stopped bringing it up. Even my doctor seemed resigned, just checking the box on the form and moving on.

The Book

In October 2024, I was at a used bookstore on 12th Street NE, browsing the self-help section because I was looking for something about sleep. Wedged between two books on meditation was a beaten-up paperback: “Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” I’d heard of it. A colleague at work had quit using it years ago and wouldn’t shut up about it. I figured for three bucks, I’d take a look.

I read it in two sittings. And something happened that hadn’t happened in any of my five previous quit attempts: my perspective shifted. Carr’s argument, stripped to its core, is that smokers don’t enjoy cigarettes. They think they do, but what they’re actually enjoying is the temporary relief of a withdrawal symptom that the previous cigarette caused. The cigarette creates the itch and then scratches it, and the smoker thinks the scratching feels good without realizing the itch wouldn’t exist without the cigarettes. It’s a closed loop. A con game. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Carr says you should feel happy about quitting, not deprived. Not like you’re giving something up, but like you’re escaping from something. That reframing hit me hard. Every previous attempt, I’d felt like I was losing my best friend, my comfort, my coping tool. Carr made me see that the “friend” was the one causing the problem I was trying to cope with. The cigarette wasn’t relieving my stress. It was creating a new kind of stress, withdrawal stress, and then pretending to relieve it.

Adding the Patches

Here’s where I deviate from the Carr orthodoxy. I finished the book and I understood the mental framework. I believed it. But I also knew my body. I’d been feeding it nicotine for thirty-two years, and I wasn’t confident that a mental framework alone would carry me through the physical withdrawal. I’d watched five attempts crumble when the physical symptoms got too intense.

So I combined them. I used Carr’s book for my head and patches for my body. The patches, Nicoderm CQ 21mg, would manage the physical withdrawal while I internalized the mental shift that Carr described. I’d taper off the patches over eight weeks, giving my mind time to solidify its new understanding while my body slowly adjusted to decreasing nicotine levels.

Patricia thought I was hedging my bets. She was right. I was. But I’d rather hedge and succeed than go pure and fail for a sixth time.

I set my quit date for November 1st, 2024. I read the last chapter of the book, the one where Carr says to smoke your final cigarette and feel happy about it. I smoked it on my back steps at 11:30 PM on October 31st. And I did feel something. Not happiness exactly, but recognition. I saw the con for what it was. I was scratching an itch that the previous cigarette had caused. And I was done scratching.

I slapped on the patch the next morning.

The First Weeks

The patch handled the worst of the physical withdrawal. I had mild headaches, some trouble sleeping, but nothing compared to my cold turkey attempt. What the patch couldn’t handle, and what Carr’s book did, was the mental craving.

When a thought popped up saying “I want a cigarette,” I countered it with Carr’s logic: no, you don’t want a cigarette. You want relief from the withdrawal that the last cigarette caused. And you’re getting that relief from the patch. The cigarette would just restart the cycle.

It sounds simple, and it is simple, but it requires constant repetition. I must have told myself some version of “the cigarette creates the itch” a hundred times in the first week. After a while, it stuck. The craving would come, and instead of feeling deprived, I’d feel a little flash of anger at the cigarettes for having conned me for three decades.

The Hardest Moment

Week three. A Wednesday night. Patricia and I had an argument. Not about smoking. About money, about the roof that needed replacing, about whether Terrell’s graduate school tuition was our responsibility. The kind of argument that builds pressure in your chest and makes your jaw clench. For thirty-two years, my response to this kind of stress had been to walk out the back door and smoke until the anger drained away.

I walked out the back door. I stood on the steps. I had no cigarettes. The patch was on my arm, so the physical craving was muted, but the behavioral pull was overwhelming. My brain said: this is the spot where you fix this feeling. This is where you go when the world is too much. And there’s nothing here.

I stood there for ten minutes. I let the anger sit. I didn’t try to fix it or fight it or breathe through it. I just stood there and felt it. And gradually, it faded on its own. Not because nicotine took it away, but because emotions are temporary and they fade if you let them. That was a revelation. Thirty-two years of smoking had convinced me that I needed a chemical intervention to manage my emotions. I didn’t. I just needed to wait.

I went back inside and apologized to Patricia for walking out. She said, “Did you smoke?” I said no. She looked at me for a long moment and then she hugged me. That was the first time she’d hugged me after an argument in years. I think she’d been afraid to get close because I always smelled like Newports.

The Turning Point

About two months in, I was at the Metro station at Brookland, heading to work, and I saw a man about my age standing outside smoking a Newport. He was hunched against the cold, sucking on the cigarette with that desperate urgency that smokers have in winter, trying to finish before the train comes. And I looked at him and I felt something I’d never felt before about a smoker: pity. Not judgment. Pity. Because I understood. I understood the trap he was in, the cycle, the con. He thought he was enjoying that cigarette. He was just relieving the discomfort that the previous one had caused.

That was when I knew I was free. Not when the cravings stopped. Not when the patches came off. When I looked at a smoker and felt compassion instead of envy.

Life Now

Nineteen months clean. I tapered off the patches over eight weeks, stepping down from 21mg to 14mg to 7mg to nothing. The transition off the patches was mild, nothing like quitting cigarettes cold turkey. By the time I removed the last patch, my brain had internalized Carr’s framework deeply enough that the remaining physical adjustment was manageable.

I can breathe. My morning cough is gone. My blood pressure is down fifteen points. My doctor at Howard said my lung sounds are “significantly improved.” I walk two miles every morning before work, down Michigan Avenue to Catholic University and back. I take the stairs at the office instead of the elevator. These are things I couldn’t do a year and a half ago without wheezing.

I’ve saved over $6,800. That’s nineteen months of not buying Newports in DC. Patricia and I put some of it toward the roof. We put some toward Terrell’s tuition. The money that was going up in smoke is going toward our family now. That fact still staggers me when I think about it.

Patricia says I smell like myself again. She says she’d forgotten what I smelled like without cigarettes. I’d forgotten too. Turns out I smell like Ivory soap and whatever laundry detergent she uses, and that’s fine by me.

I’ve given away four copies of Carr’s book. Two to coworkers, one to my barber, one to a guy at church. I’m not evangelical about it. I just leave it on a desk with a note that says “this helped me” and walk away. Two of those four people have quit.

To the Person Still Smoking

Allen Carr won’t work for everyone. Patches won’t work for everyone. But maybe the combination will work for you. Or maybe you need Chantix plus therapy. Or gum plus a support group. Or something nobody’s invented yet. The point is to find your combination, the one that covers your specific weak spots.

If your weak spot is mental, if you feel deprived when you quit, if you mourn cigarettes like you’re losing a friend, read Carr’s book. It won’t fix your body, but it might fix your thinking. And if your weak spot is physical, if the withdrawal symptoms flatten you every time, use the patches or the gum or whatever takes the edge off. There’s no award for suffering.

And if anyone tells you you’re doing it wrong because you’re combining methods that aren’t “supposed” to go together: ignore them. The only wrong way to quit is the way that doesn’t work. Whatever gets you to zero cigarettes is the right method, period.

You are not alone. There are fifty-five-year-old federal employees in Northeast DC who smoked for thirty-two years and found their way out. I’m one of them. You can be the next.

My name is Ray Washington. I’m fifty-five, I live in Brookland, and I don’t smoke Newports anymore. The con is over. I walked away from the table. You can too.