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Addiction Neutralisation Therapy

by Robert Brynin, Director, National Stop-Smoking Centres

Everyone thinks they understand addiction. There are countless books on the subject, there are professional bodies dedicated to it, and yet most of what is written is simply wrong. How can I, not a doctor, say such a thing?

The first mistake many people make is confusing addiction and dependence. I've heard lots of doctors, read many learned articles, getting this wrong. Addiction is, by definition, what happens in your body when you force it to adapt to a poisonous substance. Psychological dependence is what happens in your brain when you are so used to being dependent on the substance you become afraid to stop taking it. The very sight of a packet of heroin will raise the blood pressure of a user. Opening a bottle excites an alcoholic. The smoker loves opening a new packet. None of these things is addictive, but the brain has learned a Pavlovian response - to the delivery method for the drug the body needs.

Having explained what psychological dependence is I'm going to drop the subject, because I want to explain the addiction that underpins all dependence, and a new way to overcome it (actually a rather old and very well tested way, but probably new to you).

And before you think who is he to talk about addiction if he's not even a doctor, let me explain that everything I'm going to tell you was researched by the late Dr Richard Mackarness, an eminent consultant at Basingstoke District Hospital, a doctor many of us owe our lives to.

Dr Mac was a Clinical Ecologist doing work with the desensitisation of allergy, and what he learned was that if you can stop an allergic reaction you can do exactly the same for addiction, because, and this is the clincher, allergy and addiction are opposites (and therefore closely related). Allergy, when you think about it, is in simple terms the body reading a substance mistakenly as poisonous and producing a poison reaction. Well tobacco is poisonous, isn't it? In fact it's the most poisonous substance legally available in the shops. So why doesn't it also produce a poison reaction? Actually it does. Remember the first ever cigarette? Did it taste good or bad? It was bad wasn't it (I remember it that way, for sure)? So why did it taste bad then, if it doesn't now? Because it is poisonous, and your body was telling you not to do it, but you persisted and you taught your body to accept the poisons in tobacco. You taught it to switch off the poison reaction. But the only way it can do that is if it keeps getting the chemical information to maintain its adaptation. If it doesn't, it will give you symptoms to ask for it. These are withdrawal symptoms, and it's what we call masked allergy, because now, instead of telling you when you take a poison, your body it telling you when you don't.

The breakthrough with Addiction Neutralisation Therapy came simply because Dr Mac said if we can neutralise (desensitise) allergy, we can do exactly the same for addiction. And he was proved right. Of the 300 patients he tried it on at the hospital, all of them reported control over the craving for tobacco. We have since gone on to treat more than 5000 patients with a similar result.

Before I explain how it's done, I'll answer the question you must now be asking yourself. Why, if it's that simple, isn't the treatment universally available? Why doesn't the National Health Service in Britain provide it? Think about it. In Britain alone, nicotine replacement products represent a market worth £60 million pounds a year. Addiction Neutralisation Therapy could wipe out that market at a stroke. The pharmaceutical companies have complete domination of NHS smoking cessation policy, and also sponsor the NHS Smokers' Helpline and the Quitline, thus ensuring that doctors, nurses, the media and the smoking public believe that their drug products are the only option. It's not difficult for them to do, and if you were one of their shareholders it is exactly what you would expect them to do.

Now back to the science. In your immune system you have receptors that are now adapted to the chemical structure of tobacco smoke (or Scotch whisky, or cocaine, or whatever else). Those receptors were inherited from your parents, but how they respond when you learn to smoke is unique to you. If they don't get, say, nicotine, they send messages to your brain to demand it - withdrawal symptoms. (That, by the way, is how your brain becomes psychologically dependent, but I said I was going to stay off that subject.) By blocking those receptors, with a dummy molecule, they stop sending the messages. in Addiction Neutralisation Therapy a dummy tobacco molecule is administered by mouth in a water base. Each time a craving occurs, one drop of the neutrogen, as it's called, stops the message going to the brain. It's the opposite of Zyban (buproprion hydrochloride), the antidepressant drug doctors tried to use with smokers. That was trying to stop the brain receiving the messages, hence the rather serious side effects (like death in some cases, which we don't consider an acceptable side-effect). And NRPs, like the patch, try to block the receptors, but because they do it with nicotine, you remain addicted, so there seems little point. The neutrogen has no toxicity and therefore is totally safe in use, even, for example, in pregnancy, and neither does it keep you addicted. Most patients need to take it only for a week or two.

Of course Addiction Neutralisation Therapy could easily be adapted for other drugs. Dr Mac used it for both alcohol and heroin at Pleasant View Clinic in Melbourne, for the State of Victoria Health Commission.

Meanwhile, it is only available in Britain for tobacco within The Phoenix Programme. This programme is provided to employers for their staff and to the public in a network of clinics throughout the country.

To learn more about smoking, read How Can You expect to Stop Smoking if You Eat Tomatoes?, by Robert Brynin. To find out how the get Addiction Neutralisation Therapy (The Phoenix Programme), go to:
www.stop-smokingcentres.co.uk.

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