Aversion Therapy Article

Now's the Time to Quit
Aversion therapy is being used to help people to give up cigarettes, reports Penny Wark

The metronome ticks and every six seconds the man in the white coat says “Puff.” Then he says: “I want you to take deep puffs and focus on how you’re feeling.” The very thin girl on the stool is obliging and draws the smoke into her lungs, but by the time she is on her second cigarette, still taking a deep puff every six seconds, she is struggling. Only when she is halfway through her third cigarette — by now her throat is on fire, she feels dizzy and is close to being sick — does her tormentor allow her to stop.
Cut to another very thin girl being put through the same process. She wheedles, takes tiny puffs and churlishly grinds out the cigarettes she refuses to smoke quickly. Not to be defeated, the man in the white coat offers her another and another until, in a spectacular fit of child-like temper, she refuses to play any more.
This is what smoking does to people: it makes them sick and, if they can’t smoke as and when they want to, it makes them cross. And this is the point of rapid smoking, the procedure described above: to ram home the unpleasant effects of smoking to those who wish to give up. This is smoking cessation therapy, and it is hard core.
“When people quit smoking they should make sure they end with a bad memory,” says Dr Hayden McRobbie, visiting lecturer at the Tobacco Dependency Unit at Barts and The London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine, research fellow at the University of Auckland, and the man in the white coat. “So before they quit you get them to smoke their last cigarettes, taking a puff every six seconds, until they feel unwell. Most people can’t manage to get through two before they stop.” This is not a new technique — aversion therapies such as rapid smoking were used in the 1970s — but subsequent pharmaceutical developments left them out of vogue. McRobbie believes that rapid smoking has a place in smoking cessation treatment and that’s why he resurrects the technique in Cold Turkey, a Channel 4 programme shown tonight. His smoking guinea pigs are the model Sophie Anderton and the socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, and his task is to reprogramme their minds so that they associate smoking not with rebellion and relaxation but with disease and a painful death. For both women smoking is the final addiction to kick: Sophie has not drunk alcohol or taken cocaine for 18 months, and Tara overcame her addiction to cocaine in 2000.
“Smoking is hardest to give up because it’s legal,” says Sophie. “I smoke because I’m addicted — nicotine should be a Class A drug.”
Sophie has been smoking since she was 15 and smoked 40 a day during her “partying” days. She is now determined to lead an entirely healthy life and plans to run the London Marathon for charity in April. She has also accepted a three-year contract with a smoking cessation product, and knows that any photographs of her smoking will end the deal.
“In 2003 my mother said you’re not allowed to die before I do,” she says. “Well, I haven’t changed my lifestyle that much to get killed off by cigarettes. And I’ve proved in the past that when I decide to do something, I do it.”
McRobbie believes that there is no single way to give up smoking, and that different tactics suit different people. So he tailors Sophie and Tara’s aversion therapy to clash with their concerns. Both lead lives that depend on vanity, so as well as confronting them with the cancer-ridden lungs of a smoker, and depriving Sophie of oxygen so that she experiences the breathlessness of someone with emphysema, Tara, now 34, is made up as she will look at 40 and Sophie is told to smoke in front of a mirror. She hates this. “Hayden told me to really look at myself when I smoke,” she says. “I find that hard because it makes me realise what I’m doing to myself.”
But by her own admission the aversion therapy is at its most potent when — at 28 — she learns that smoking can lead to infertility, and to underline the message she is introduced to an adorable baby. McRobbie makes no claims for rapid smoking, other than to suggest that it could be incorporated into smoking cessation treatment for those who want it. “If you can relieve people’s withdrawal symptoms you can help them with the transition to being smoke-free, ” he says. “This method could be a useful addition to medical treatments. On its own it’s not going to make people stop smoking, but it may be an extra barrier between the smoker and the cigarette.”
Cold Turkey, Channel 4, tonight at 9. www.givingupsmoking.co.uk; 0800 1690169
Read the following article then explain concisely, using the information in the article, what 'aversion therapy' is, and why it possibly works.

Use your own words as far as possible.