Chantix and Allen Carr Together Helped Me Quit After 21 Years

I’m Sam Okafor, 44 years old, Columbus, Ohio. I’ve been smoke-free for twenty-six months. Before that, I smoked for twenty-one years. Newport 100s. That was my cigarette. The green box was as familiar to me as my own wallet.

I started at twenty-three. I’d come to the States from Nigeria when I was nineteen for college, and nobody in my family smoked. Not my parents, not my aunts and uncles, nobody. I picked it up at a house party in my senior year at Ohio State. A friend handed me a Newport and I took one drag and my head swam and I thought, this is interesting. Within a month I was buying my own packs. Within a year I was hooked. By thirty I was a pack-a-day guy, and I stayed there for the next fourteen years.

I’m a pharmacist. I work at a CVS on Morse Road. The irony of standing behind a counter selling Nicorette and NicoDerm patches while smelling like cigarette smoke is not lost on me. I knew every fact about nicotine addiction. I could recite the stats in my sleep: smoking kills 480,000 Americans a year, it takes an average of 8 to 11 attempts to quit, nicotine reaches the brain in 10 seconds. I counseled patients on smoking cessation every single week. And then I’d clock out and smoke in my car before driving home. I lived in two realities and I kept them completely separate.

I tried quitting seven times. Let me run through them because I think the failures matter as much as the success.

Attempt one: cold turkey, 2009. Lasted four days. The anxiety was unbearable. I’m not talking about regular worry. I’m talking about a physical sensation, this tight band around my chest that wouldn’t let go. I caved.

Attempt two: nicotine gum, 2011. The gum helped a little but I was using it wrong, chewing it like regular gum instead of the chew-and-park method. Even after I fixed my technique, I kept having one cigarette a day “just to take the edge off.” That turned back into five, then ten, then a full pack.

Attempt three: the patch, 2013. I had an allergic reaction to the adhesive. Red, itchy welts on my skin. I tried different brands and different body locations. Same reaction every time. My skin just couldn’t handle it.

Attempt four: Wellbutrin, 2015. Worked okay for about a month. Then I went to Lagos for my cousin’s wedding and the combination of jet lag, family stress, and being in an environment where everyone smoked destroyed my resolve. I came back to Columbus a full-time smoker again.

Attempt five: cold turkey again, 2017. Lasted eleven days. The dreams brought me back. I’d dream about smoking, wake up disappointed in myself, then realize I hadn’t actually smoked, feel relieved, and then the craving would hit so hard that I’d go smoke for real. My brain was sabotaging me in my sleep.

Attempt six: Chantix (varenicline), 2019. This was the most promising. Chantix blocks the nicotine receptors in your brain so that smoking doesn’t feel rewarding. You start taking it a week before your quit date while still smoking, and your cigarettes start tasting strange, almost metallic. By my quit date, smoking actually felt unpleasant, which was surreal after two decades of craving it. I made it six weeks. But the side effects got me. Nausea every morning, vivid dreams that were different from withdrawal dreams, not scary but incredibly detailed and weird, and a general fogginess during the day. I stopped taking it, planning to restart later. “Later” turned into never, and I was smoking again within two weeks of stopping the medication.

Attempt seven was the winner. And it was a combination I hadn’t tried before: Chantix again, but this time paired with Allen Carr’s “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.”

Here’s how that happened. My buddy Marcus, a respiratory therapist at Riverside Methodist, had quit smoking three years earlier. He’d been a Kool smoker, a pack and a half a day. He quit using the Allen Carr book and wouldn’t shut up about it. He’d been telling me to read it for years and I kept blowing him off. Self-help books aren’t really my thing. But one night we were at a Crew game and he said something that stuck with me: “The book didn’t give me willpower. It took away the desire.” That was different from anything I’d heard before. Every other method was about resisting the craving. This was about eliminating it.

I bought the book on Kindle and read it in three days. For anyone who hasn’t read it, the core idea is that smoking doesn’t actually do anything for you. It doesn’t relieve stress, it doesn’t help you concentrate, it doesn’t relax you. What it does is temporarily relieve the withdrawal from the previous cigarette, creating an illusion of benefit. Once you truly understand that, the desire to smoke fades because you realize there’s nothing to give up. You’re not sacrificing a pleasure. You’re escaping a trap.

Now, I’d tried Chantix before and the book alone might have worked, but I didn’t want to risk another failure. So I combined them. I started the Chantix first, the standard two-week ramp-up, while reading the Allen Carr book simultaneously. By the time I hit my quit date, I had two things working in my favor: the Chantix was making cigarettes taste bad and feel pointless, and the Allen Carr method had dismantled the mental framework that made me believe I needed cigarettes.

The first two weeks after quitting were still hard. I won’t sugarcoat that. The Chantix handled the physical craving better than anything else I’d tried, but it didn’t zero it out completely. And the nausea came back. I learned to take the pill with a full meal and a lot of water, which helped. The nausea was worst in the morning and usually faded by noon.

When a craving did break through, I’d repeat something from the Allen Carr book to myself: “There is nothing to give up.” That sounds like a mantra or a platitude, but when you’ve actually internalized the logic behind it, it works differently. It’s not positive thinking. It’s a factual correction. My brain was telling me I was missing something wonderful, and I was reminding it, no, I was missing nothing. The cigarette would just restart the cycle of withdrawal and temporary relief. That’s all it would do.

The hardest moment was week three. I was working a twelve-hour shift at the pharmacy, understaffed, flu season, the line was out the door. A customer got hostile about a prior authorization issue and I felt that familiar tightness in my chest that used to send me straight to the break room for a Newport. Instead, I went to the stockroom, closed the door, and stood there for three minutes breathing. Not doing anything spiritual or strategic. Just breathing. And the craving passed. When I came back out, my tech asked if I was okay. I said yeah. And I was.

I took the Chantix for the full twelve-week course this time. The side effects were manageable once I adjusted. The vivid dreams actually became something I looked forward to, they were like free movies every night, as long as they weren’t smoking dreams. The fogginess was lighter than my first round, maybe because my brain was in a better place mentally. When I stopped the Chantix at twelve weeks, I braced for the worst. It didn’t come. The Allen Carr framework held. I still didn’t want a cigarette. I wasn’t white-knuckling it. I just… didn’t want one.

That was the revelation. Every previous attempt had been about endurance, about how long I could hold out against the craving. This time, the craving was barely there. When it did show up, it was more like a reflex than a desire, the way you might reach for a light switch in a room where the switch is on the other wall. Your hand goes there out of habit, not need. And you just redirect it.

Two years out, here’s what’s changed. I can breathe. Fully, deeply, without that whistling sound I’d gotten so used to that I thought it was normal. My blood pressure is down. My gums, which had been receding, have stabilized. My pharmacist colleagues have stopped side-eyeing me when I counsel patients on quitting. That feels good. I’m not a hypocrite anymore.

I’ve gained about ten pounds, which I’m working on. My appetite came back with a vengeance once my taste buds recovered. I’m eating things I used to find bland and discovering they’re actually delicious. My wife, Chioma, keeps cooking more elaborate meals now because I can actually appreciate them.

The financial math is straightforward. Newports in Columbus were running about $9.50 a pack. That’s $66.50 a week. In twenty-six months, I’ve saved over $7,500. We put a chunk of that toward a trip to Nigeria to see my parents. My mother, who never knew I smoked, kept saying I looked healthier. She thought I’d started exercising.

Here’s what I want to tell you if you’re still smoking. If you’ve tried and failed, you’re not weak. You’re up against one of the most addictive substances on the planet and an industry that spent decades engineering that addiction. The fact that you tried at all means something.

And if one method hasn’t worked, try combining approaches. I’d failed with Chantix alone and never tried Allen Carr alone, but together they covered each other’s gaps. The Chantix dampened the physical addiction while the book rewired my thinking about what smoking actually is. Neither one alone was enough for me. Together, they were.

Read the Allen Carr book. Talk to your doctor about Chantix or whatever medication might work for you. Do both. Do three things at once if you need to. There are no rules that say you can only use one method.

You are not alone in this. Seven attempts. Seven failures. And then one success that changed everything. Your number might be eight. It might be three. You won’t know until you try the next one. So try the next one.