Quit Smoking Advisory

If you’re looking for free patches to stop smoking then where can you find them, be it online or offline?

Online

The first thing that you should do is be more creative with your search criteria and look for variations and enclose them in quotation marks, such as “free nicotine patches”. Ultimately though, you are likely to be disappointed. I have looked in many places for free nicotine patches but have not found a single site. There’s a huge reason why the drug companies don’t want to give away vast amounts of patches for free and it has nothing to do with the cost to them.

Offline

Your best bet is to try to get nicotine patches in the real world. Start with your doctor. Many doctors are given free samples by visiting sales representatives from the drugs companies. Ask your doc and see if you can give you at least a week or two for free. In some countries, you may even be able to get an entire course of patches for free, courtesy of the state healthcare system. In most countries though, these NRT products such as patches, inhalers and gum are considered over the counter consumer products and are hard to come across for free.

Why Are Free Patches So Hard To Find?

You have to think about the motivations of the drug companies for you to try patches. The drug companies are not charities, they want to make a lot of money and they know that they have a huge captive audience because most smokers, at some point in their lives, will try patches as a method of quitting cigarettes. Sure, they could entice you with a freebie but it’s not like getting a free sample of a new type of juice at your local supermarket. Like I said, they know that one day you will move to the patches anyway and you will only do it when you’re ready. They know that when you’re ready to try patches, you will look for them and buy them anyway.

Have You Ever Questioned If Patches Work At All?

Probably you were like me when I was a smoker - you never question the credibility of patches. You just assume that they must help people to quit smoking. You’ve probably heard the science behind them - you change from cigarettes to patches, cut down on the strength of patches and then eventually quit. Have you ever questioned the so-called “science” behind patches? Do they really work as intended? Does cutting down on nicotine make you more likely to succeed in your quit attempt? Have you seen any raw data?

Patches Don’t Work!

Many studies have been done on patches. More often than not, you also need to question the credibility of the authors of such studies as, quite often, the research is funded by the drug companies themselves. Even when you find independent studies, you will struggle to find many conclusions showing anything more than a minor improvement over what is already a terribly low success rate due to willpower.

The simple truth is that patches don’t work. When you move to patches you are just replacing an addiction to cigarettes with an addiction to patches (minus the tar in cigarettes). You are still hooked in one form or another. And do you really think that cutting down on patch strength is a great strategy? Then why not just cut down on cigarettes instead? If you use a cutting down strategy then whether you cut down on patches or on cigarettes will make nearly zero difference in the long term on your health - either you will still be a smoker (most likely) or you will be a non-smoker.

Patches are an invention of the drug companies designed to make lots of money. Have you ever wondered why they are so darned expensive? They are backed by a kind of pseudo-science that is designed to make you believe that they are a credible medical product when in fact, they are not.

Is There A Better Alternative?

Yes there is. Let me tell you a little about myself. I used to be a smoker just like you and I also tried the patches, I tried willpower alone too. The patches did not help me at all, they were no different to cutting down on cigarettes and that strategy failed time and time again for me.

Then I got lucky and stumbled across a little known method that allows you to quit smoking without willpower and without ever having a single craving for a cigarette. 8 years later and you could say that I am a picture of a success story. If you want to know more about this method then click here.