Land of the (Smoke-) Free

England went smoke-free in all public and work spaces about six weeks ago. For most of us that was a banner day. The process of arriving at that day (1 July 2007) was not easy and not free of strong emotion and strong beliefs on both sides.

Celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the more famous anti-ban campaigners, argued that “Pubs are not health clubs…” and “Death awaits you whether or not you smoke.” True enough on both counts, Mr Hockney, without having jack to do with the subject at hand. Of course there’ll be a few people who disagree (still!) that smoke is harmful, and they’ll probably also argue that the fact that the NHS estimates it’s been shelling out £1.7 billion per annum on treating smoking-related illness (often, it must be said, unsuccessfully), doesn’t mean those people actually sickened and in some cases died because they or people around them smoked. Whatever. Many of us used to believe (spoiler alert!) in Santa Claus, too. Now we're adults and we know better.

And then there are people who believe that smoke is harmful when they take it into their own lungs, but not to the people around them. See above.

In 2004, I remember being amazed and amused to learn that Ireland would have a smoking ban in effect before England. The Irish seemed even fonder of their smoke than the English, but there they were cleaning up the air. In fact, not only the Republic of Ireland, but also Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all had bans in effect before England.

But now it’s official. Loopholes are built in for some bus shelters (depending on your local council) and phone boxes, and smoking has another year to run in psychiatric wards, until 1 July 2008. Then you’d better watch out for a lot of really cranky British psychos.

Unlike the state of Washington, where I live when I’m not here, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about smoking in doorways, so as I pass by pubs these days, the doorways are often crowded with smokers obeying the letter of the law. There are metal boxes on a lot of lamp-posts for depositing fag-ends, and I’ve actually witnessed smokers using those, though dropping them on the pavement is still more the rule than the exception in some places.

And what of public opinion? It all depends who you talk to, of course. Some smokers interviewed by the newspapers and TV say they don’t mind the ban – “It makes it nicer for non-smokers.” “I’ve been smoking a lot less.” Some non-smokers don’t seem to get the point – “I don’t smoke myself, but I think the smoking ban spoils the atmosphere.” Of course that person is 21; she may someday have the sense to be grateful for the extra years she’s been given a chance at.

And while few will still argue that smoking doesn’t kill, we’ve already had a tragic case of it contributing to murder. On 23 July at a nightclub in Fulham Broadway - just south of where I live - James Oyebola, a retired boxer, asked some customers to comply with the law and put out their cigarettes. One of them shot him in the face as he left the club. His family took him off life-support four days later, after he was declared brain-dead.

I’d like to remind any Americans out there how rare firearm deaths are in the U.K. Unlike our own country, gun crime over here is less than 0.5% of violent crime and less than 0.01% of total crime. If you adjusted for population the U.S. would still have 34 times the U.K.’s number of gunshot homicides, according to crimeinfo.org.uk., and that statistic doesn’t mention those who are shot, but don’t subsequently die of their wounds. So a guy getting shot to death for any reason is headline-worthy, top-news-story-worthy, even in a city the size of London. For the reason to be a request to put out a cigarette makes it that much more horrifying. For it to have happened in easy walking distance of my house makes me even sadder than I might feel otherwise, as though I owned some part of the tragedy. I probably heard the sirens that night, and wondered what was going on.

So cigarettes are bad, o-kay? Let’s be grateful if we don’t smoke ’em, and grateful if we live somewhere smoking ’em is banned in public. While we’re at it, let’s be grateful for no good reason other than feeling gratitude. Peace out.

Still Learning After All These Years

Right: TFT Simplified

While I was on my NLP training this last spring I chanced to witness a remarkable thing. A few of the delegates were out to dinner with one of the course assistants, Kevin Laye, an NLP master practitioner with a practice in Harley Street who's also a certified trainer of Thought Field Therapy. TFT works by tapping the start-points of acupuncture meridians to alleviate a number of physical and emotional problems. I'd already heard some interesting things about it; a friend of mine had used it to instantly eliminate someone’s post-surgical pain, so I already had the idea you could do cool things if you knew this stuff.

As we sat down to dinner one of my companions, Stephanie, told me that Kevin had recently treated her using TFT. She'd been suffering for some time from myaesthenia gravis, a serious condition with a dim prognosis. I'd only met her that day, but she was as full of fun and energy as anyone I'd ever seen, and she assured me that less than a month before she'd been more or less bedridden. I was impressed; this TFT stuff was even more interesting than I thought.

Another of our party - Elizabeth - had found walking to the restaurant quite painful. She suffered from a spinal condition related to an old injury, and her doctors had assured her it was all downhill from here. She dragged one leg behind her as she walked, and she told me recently that the pain had been so bad at that point that she would walk along hoping no-one she was with would talk to her, because it took all her concentration just to get through the next step.

So after dinner Kevin remarked that Elizabeth seemed to be holding a lot of tension in her shoulders, and he did something that fixed that. She felt better immediately, and told us about her condition, never mentioning the pain, but that was evident to anyone who'd been paying attention. So Kevin did another treatment on her – total time two or three minutes for both. Then he suggested she go look at her reflection in the restaurant door, 'cause her face had entirely transformed, and she looked at least ten years younger than she had walking in.

A moment later someone said "Where's Elizabeth?" and I turned around to see her sprinting down the block. When she reached the end she turned around and ran back again. That's the point at which I turned to Kevin and said "I've GOT to learn to do that."

And that's how I came to be at Kevin's TFT training in Nottingham in June, getting certified again (hey, it happens...). I've had some successes since, though nothing to rival Kevin's dinner-table miracles. One of the most fascinating things about it, to me, is that no-one can explain why it works. That’s not to say they don’t try, but the explanations sound (to my ear at least) like twaddle. Those of you who know me know I have a low tolerance for twaddle. Just reading an explanation or description wouldn’t convince me TFT necessarily had any merit as a healing modality, but I’m not inclined to deny direct experience. Kevin is a physicist by training, and if you ask him how it works he’ll tell you “It works very well.”

Elizabeth has a slight limp, but she's free of pain, full of energy, and making her doctors scratch their heads. Stephanie, too, is still the picture of health. When her illness was at its worst she was making plans to put her 3-year-old daughter up for adoption, since she could no longer do the simplest things for her, and there was no-one else to turn to. Now she and her daughter run around and do things together, and she has a wonderful new man in her life, and plans for a healthy future.

Before I head back for Seattle in September I'll be taking another training with Kevin, this time in his method for helping people stop smoking. He has a very high success rate with a combination of TFT, NLP, and hypnosis, and he strongly advises his students to go forth and make a living helping people.

So if you see me out in Pioneer Square in Seattle dragging clients off 1st Avenue and into my office, you'll know that I've taken Kevin's advice. Hmmm... "Send me your phobics, your depressives, your hacking smokers yearning to breathe free..." Yeah, what the hell? I just might.