New smoking cessation therapy proves promising... assuming you still want your nicotine addiction

A novel technology for delivering nicotine to the lungs may soon give smokers a new way to kick the habit. When compared to the nicotine vapor delivery system used in the Nicotrol/Nicorette inhaler, the new technology proved more effective at delivering nicotine to the blood stream.

"We wanted to replicate the experience of smoking without incurring the dangers associated with cigarettes, and we wanted to do so more effectively than the nicotine replacement therapies currently on the market," said Jed Rose, Ph.D., director of the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research where the technology is being developed.

The Nicotrol inhaler is a smoking cessation therapy that delivers nicotine vapor to the mouth and upper airways, but little of it reaches the lungs. Duke's new technology combines the vapor phase of pyruvic acid, which occurs naturally in the body, and nicotine. [ScienceCodex]

All fascinating, but why so much research to keep people addicted to nicotine? As I have said many times, the stop smoking propaganda seems designed to make people's addiction more socially acceptable - and keep the profits rolling - rather than curing the nicotine addiction.

Nicotine replacement therapy is over-promoted since most ex-smokers quit unassisted

Health authorities should emphasize the positive message that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, despite the promotion of cessation drugs by pharmaceutical companies and many tobacco control advocates.The dominant messages about smoking cessation contained in most tobacco control campaigns, which emphasize that serious attempts at quitting smoking must be pharmacologically or professionally mediated, are critiqued in an essay in this week's PLoS Medicine by Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Australia. This overemphasis on quit methods like nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has led to the "medicalisation of smoking cessation," despite good evidence that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is quitting "cold turkey" or reducing-then-quitting. Reviewing 511 studies published in 2007 and 2008 the authors report that studies repeatedly show that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided and most ex-smokers report that cessation was less difficult than expected. The medicalisation of smoking cessation is fuelled by the extent and influence of pharmaceutical support for cessation intervention studies, say the authors. They cite a recent review of randomized controlled trials of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) that found that 51% of industry-funded trials reported significant cessation effects, while only 22% of non-industry trials did. Many assisted cessation studies—but few if any unassisted cessation studies—involve researchers who declare support from a pharmaceutical company manufacturing cessation products.


The authors conclude that "public sector communicators should be encouraged to redress the overwhelming dominance of assisted cessation in public awareness, so that some balance can restored in smokers' minds regarding the contribution that assisted and unassisted smoking cessation approaches can make to helping them quit smoking."

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Absolutely spot-on, but as we know, so-called NRT is just a way for the nicotine industry to make more money, and that nicotine industry now includes pharmaceuticals as well as tobacco companies.