The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Massachusetts in the United States who are now calling for greater regulation of which nicotine products can be sold over the counter.

Lead author Hillel Alpert, a research scientist at HSPH, said: “This study shows that using NRT is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long-term than trying to quit on one’s own.”

The researchers followed 787 adult smokers in Massachusetts who had recently quit smoking. They were surveyed over three time periods: 2001-2002, 2003-2004, and 2005-2006 and were asked whether they had used a nicotine replacement therapy in the form of the nicotine patch placed on the skin, nicotine gum, nicotine inhaler, or nasal spray to help them quit, and if so, what was the longest period of time they had used the product continuously.

They were also asked if they had joined a quit-smoking programme or received help from a doctor, counsellor, or other professional.
Related Articles

The results showed that, for each time period, almost a third of recent quitters reported to have relapsed. The researchers found no difference in relapse rate among those who used NRT for more than six weeks, with or without professional counselling. No difference in quitting success with use of NRT was found for either heavy or light smokers.

Mr Alpert said that using public funds to provide NRT to the population at large is of questionable value, particularly when it reduces the amount of money available for smoking interventions shown in previous studies to be effective, such as media campaigns, promotion of no smoking policies, and tobacco price increases.

The study was published online by the journal Tobacco Control.

In this frame of mind, far from the cigarettes becoming less precious, they become the most precious thing in the world and rather than feeling free from smoking and being happy about it, they will be feeling miserable and deprived that they can’t do it anymore unlike their friends and colleagues who still smoke. This sadly is the point where most smokers then start to doubt the whether or not they can actually succeed and start to look for excuses to have “just one”. However “just one” is never the case and most find themselves back in the same position they were in before they decided to quit.

All smokers have been through this trauma on at least one and usually many occasions and each time we fail and start smoking again, it just reinforces the belief hat stopping smoking permanently is difficult.

Well we have some fantastic news for you – STOPPING SMOKING IS ONE OF THE EASIEST THINGS TO DO so long as you fully understand the real truth around nicotine addiction and smoking. Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking is the world’s leading stop smoking method and has success rates many times higher than any other method available. We understand the real reasons why people smoke and can cure your addiction to nicotine in just one 5 hour session. Stopping smoking is just like doing anything in life, if you go about it in the wrong way with the wrong information, you are almost guaranteed to fail. Thats where Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking is different.

At the Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking sessions, we ignore all the powerful reasons why you SHOULDN’T smoke and instead focus on the reasons why you DO smoke. By de-bunking the reasons to continue smoking as myths and illusions, you will see for yourself that not only is stopping smoking easy, but you will be able to fully enjoy life to the full without needing any willpower, without suffering any terrible physical withdrawals, without putting on any weight, without using any drugs, pills, patches, gums, needles, lasers of any other gimmicks and at the same time you will ENJOY THE WHOLE PROCESS OF STOPPING SMOKING.

Make 2012 the year that you quit smoking for the last time. We run clinics our stop smoking clinics in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh on a monthly basis and offer a full three month money back guarantee if you fail to stop smoking so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

To help you make the decision to attend we would like to offer £50 off the normal cost of our sessions to all bookings made in the first 7 days of 2012. Just enter the word FIFTY in the discount code box when booking online and you will receive £50 off. Alternatively you can book by calling 0131 449 7858 and quoting discount code FIFTY.

For session dates and booking information visit www.easywayscotland.co.uk/bookings/

We look forward to helping you become a happy non-smoker for life.

Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking Team in London are used to dealing with all kinds of requests; from celebrity clients who want to stop smoking in the privacy of their own homes – to global corporate clients who want to help their staff stop smoking at stop smoking seminars held in their London offices. But even the team in London were excited to hear from Jamie Oliver’s brilliant Fifteen Apprentice programme in London. The Fifteen Apprentice Programme, part of the Jamie Oliver Foundation, uses the magic of food to give young people a chance to have a better future. Now in its tenth year the programme is seeking to do as much as it can to encourage the young people embarking on a career in catering to establish positive patterns.

We were delighted to arrange a seminar via our London stop smoking clinic’s corporate service and it was wonderful to receive the feedback from Jamie Oliver’s team and the attendees. Testimonials from people who have stopped smoking can really encourage smokers to attempt to stop. Clearly – when smokers hear how easy it can be to stop (as long as you know how) it encourages them even more.

Nikki Giles from The Jamie Oliver Foundation provided some lovely feedback “I am so grateful that Allen Carr’s Easyway agreed and facilitated a stop smoking workshop for our apprentices. Each year we have a majority who smoke and who want to quit but have never managed to successfully. The workshop was the first time I have ever experienced such a genuinely effective method which removes the struggle typifying most attempts to quit. Thank you very much.”

It’s even more wonderful to hear a selection of comments about Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking from some of the participants from the Fifteen Apprentice Programme

Kelsey “I enjoyed the workshop, I learnt more about how smoking affects you mentally and physically. I haven’t smoked since and I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking seriously about quitting.”

Ayssa “After the workshop I feel really liberated and I am not dreading as much the next occasion when I might want a cigarette (as I did when I tried quitting before). I can’t think of a single good reason for smoking anymore and feel a lot more confident about being a non-smoker.”

Michael “Before the workshop I had many poor reasons for smoking, like boredom. The Allen Carr course has made me realise that there are no actual benefits to smoking and I’m confident that I won’t ever go back.”

The seminar was presented by Colleen Dwyer, a senior therapist at Allen Carr’s Easyway’s London clinic. Colleen has helped tens of thousands of smokers stop smoking in London and says “It’s a wonderful feeling helping people to stop smoking. If that wasn’t great enough – helping them to find it easy to stop smoking as opposed to them feeling like they’ve quit smoking with a sense of loss – is a magical factor. It’s why so many smokers in London (and 40 other locations in the UK and 45+ countries around the globe) who want to get off cigarettes choose Allen Carr’s Easyway.”

For this session date only we want to offer smokers the chance to attend this session for just £155 saving a massive £75 on the usual fee. This still comes with the three month money back guarantee and equates to around just 4 weeks cigarette money.

So, what are you waiting for? This offer is open to the first five smokers who call our office on 0131 449 7858 and book for this Saturdays session. Simply quote the phrase “prove me wrong” and you will receive the £75 discount. You have nothing to lose……and everything to gain. The session runs from 9.00am and finished around 2.00pm by which point we aim to send you all home as happy non smokers.

Imperial and BAT are two of the largest tobacco companies in the world, both FTSE 100 businesses. Yet in the recent UK government Tobacco Control Plan for England there was no mention of the UK’s key role in the worldwide tobacco business. We may be world leaders in tobacco control at home, but we are exporting tobacco related death and disease to the developing world on a large and growing scale, cheered on by many in the City.

Is it too much to hope that the next tobacco control plan will directly address our leading role in the forthcoming lung cancer epidemic that will affect the developing world?

Imperial is well named; developing country ministers would do well to recognise the imperial ambitions of all the transnational tobacco companies, and implement to the full the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. After all, these companies seek to profit by creating a lung cancer epidemic in your countries in the decades to come.

I’m afraid not. When you look at the fact that “going it alone” gives a paltry success rate of around just 3% it will not create much excitement amongst smokers at the prospect increasing their chances of success by so little. If it is as effective as current approved methods then bad news again I’m afraid. Because according to official statistics, your chances of successfully stopping smoking and staying stopped for 12 months with the current approved methods is just 5-7%. So no real change in the overall chances of success.

The main advantage of this particular drug being approved it would seem is not in favour of the smokers of the nation but instead in a massive cost saving to the NHS. The current wonder pill Champix (which has been linked to depression and suicides) costs the NHS around £200 for a 12 week course and also has low long term success rates. This new drug costs them just £6 for a 4 week course. I have a funny feeling that BIG PHARMA will not take this one lying down as it would pose a serious threat to their nicotine maintenance product ranges and the over priced and unsuccessful wonder pills they produce, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

This is just another example of give smoker’s false hope that round the corner there is a silver bullet that they can take for a few weeks and wake up one morning never smoking again. In terms of pills or potions it will never happen. Smokers need to be given a non pharma alternative for stopping smoking and as things stand they are being deprived of the worlds leading stop smoking method Allen Carr’s Easyway due to the lack of foresight and bravery to stand up to the big pharma companies.

Time for a change in the range of options made available to smokers. Not all smokers want to take drugs to stop smoking so they should be offered a proven and successful alternative.

The call by the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies for a “complete overhaul” of film regulation to protect young people “from pervasive and highly damaging imagery” has been rejected despite compelling evidence.

“Smoking in films remains a major and persistent driver of smoking uptake among children and young people, which the actions of irresponsible film makers, incompetent regulators and insouciant politicians are abjectly failing to control,” wrote Alison Lyons and John Britton from the centre.

Researchers at the University of Bristol found that 15-year-olds most exposed to films in which characters smoked were 73 per cent more likely to have tried a cigarette, and nearly 50 per cent more likely to be a current smoker, than those who watched the fewest films featuring smoking.

The links are even starker when analysed alongside comparable international studies: viewing smoked-filled films more than doubles the risk of a teenager experimenting with cigarettes and increases the risk of current smoking by two-thirds.

This latest research, published in Thorax, has triggered calls for films that feature smoking to be automatically classified as 18 and to be regarded as dangerous as illicit drugs and violence. Stricter regulations over the past decade have limited tobacco advertising on TV, in shops and magazines but this does not extend to smoking imagery in films.

Smoking has played a symbolic role in films: think James Dean in Easy Rider and John Travolta and his T-Birds in Grease. But health experts say most smoking is unnecessary to the plot and characters, yet glamorises a health hazard to impressionable youngsters.

A Department of Culture, Sports and Media spokesman said: “The Government believes the current arrangements provide sufficient control on the depiction of smoking in films and a total ban would be a disproportionate interference. This action would undermine the credibility, and therefore the quality, of domestically produced films.”

There is no pleasure gained when a prediction of calamity is proven correct – especially when it is likely to effect so many millions of lives in such a profound and deeply tragic way. We’ve written many times about Government Sponsored Addiction over the past decades with the prescription of nicotine products (nicotine patches and gum etc) being used in attempts to help smokers to quit.

We certainly appear to be in an “Emperor’s Clothes” situation with the very same people who claimed that nicotine products could cure addiction to nicotine now driving through plans for nicotine to be used in order to keep smokers hooked to the drug on an ongoing, long-term basis!

The Guardian describes how the Cabinet Office’s behavioral insight team – better known as the nudge unit – wants to adopt the new technology because policy officials believe the rigid “quit or die” approach to smoking advice no longer “works”. As if it ever did!

They now want nicotine addiction to be “managed” to “help” smokers who otherwise won’t quit – an approach the unit believes could prevent millions of smoking deaths. Managing addiction? Really?

The result? A green light for new products that deliver nicotine to addicts. A strategy of “don’t cure the addict – feed them”.

So called experts have advised the UK government that the nicotine contained in some new, smokefree cigarettes is no more harmful than caffeine in coffee.

The Guardian reports a Cabinet Office source saying: “A lot of countries are moving to ban this stuff; we think that’s a mistake.”

Of course the real mistake is that despite Allen Carr’s explicit advice to the contrary, the Government, Department of Health, NICE, and ASH, pursued a decade long folly of attempting to cure nicotine addiction by giving the addict nicotine. Not only has this cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds – more importantly it has cost the lives of tens of thousands of smokers who, had they been provided with an effective means of stopping smoking, might not have perished at the hands of their addiction.

The sickening denouement? Rather than investigate Allen Carr’s Easyway method as a safe, highly effective, cost effective solution to the smoking problem the same people who pursued the use of nicotine to cure nicotine addiction are now abandoning attempts to cure smokers of their addiction and instead planning to keep them hooked on nicotine indefinitely.

The Guardian reports “The Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is looking into approving these devices for use. If it finds in their favour, the government is likely to push for them to be placed prominently in shops alongside tobacco cigarettes, where they would be sold at a cheaper rate.”

Allen Carr’s Easyway organisation also predicted some time ago that soon these products will not only be on general sale, but marketed aggressively towards not just new customers, but our children. Keep an eye out for toffee and chocolate flavoured nicotine sprays advertised in much the same way as cigarettes were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970’s.

Our blogs over the past few years have highlighted the likelihood of the latest news delivered in The Guardian.

April 2011

Are friends electric?

The nicotine war is warming up

March 2011

Smoking bans still derigeur

August 2010

Letter to the editor

December 2008

Is the government’s smoking cessation strategy working?

You can read the full story from The Guardian here –

Guardian.co.uk

Philip Morris International (PMI), which makes Marlboro cigarettes, has submitted Freedom of Information (FoI) requests asking for the data from the University of Stirling.

The research, involving thousands of teenagers, examined why they start smoking and what they think of marketing by tobacco companies. Academics said that handing over the information would be a major breach of confidence and could jeopardise future research.
University facing information request from tobacco company

Professor Gerard Hastings, of the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research, said: “It is deeply concerning they are even trying to get this data. We are talking about children and this is data the tobacco companies themselves would never be allowed to collect.”

He said it would be “catastrophic” if the centre lost its fight and was forced to hand over the data.

He said: “Most fundamentally this information was given to us by young people in complete confidence. We assured them we would treat it with absolute confidence and that it would be restricted to the research.

“There is no way that Philip Morris qualifies in that definition.

“It has enormous implications for academic freedom.”

One of the researchers has also received anonymous phonecalls trying to discredit her work, though there is no suggestion they are linked to PMI in any way at all.

The centre, which is part of the university’s Institute for Social Marketing, of which Prof Hastings is director, was established in 1999 by Cancer Research UK and aims to discover why children start smoking. Over the past decade the study has involved up to 6000 teenagers and young people aged 13-24.

The department is currently preparing a response to the FoI request which it will pass to the Information Commissioner. Prof Hastings said the process was taking a lot of time and effort.

A PMI spokeswoman said: “PMI made a Freedom of Information request to understand more about a research project conducted by the University of Stirling regarding plain packaging for cigarettes.

“Such government-funded research conducted by public institutions is covered by the Freedom of Information Act, in accordance with which members of the public can request information held by public authorities.

“With regards to this FoI request, the Scottish Information Commissioner confirmed in his decision of June 30, that we had a legitimate interest in seeking the information and asked the university to respond to the request.

“We are not seeking any private or confidential information on any individuals involved with the research. As provided by the Freedom of Information Act, confidential and private information concerning individuals should not be disclosed.”

She said that the commissioner also concluded that the information request submitted by PMI was not designed to cause disruption or annoyance to the university.

Seriously though, doesn’t this now prove that the time has come for the Scottish Government to engage with other alternative methods of smoking cessation. Millions of our taxpayers money has been thrown down the drain offering these quite frankly ridiculous treatments. MILLIONS OF POUNDS SPENT OF TAXPAYERS MONEY TO DECREASE SMOKING BY 0.1 % and Sheila Duffy of Ash Scotland thinks this is a success!!!!

Even more ridiculous is that the overall budget for tobacco related services was £20.3 million. By my basic arithmetic that works out at a accost of £16,133 for every smoker they apparently cured….

If the Government continues with the same plan and continues to bring smoking rates down by the same amount every year they will eventually reach their target to go from 24.2% to 22% in just over 20 years!!!

Please read below the response by Sheila Duffy from Ash Scotland.

Commenting on the publication of the 2009/10 Scottish Household Survey today [Wednesday 17 August] which shows that smoking among adults has reduced by 0.1 percentage point since the previous year to 24.2%, short of the Scottish Government National Indicator to reduce the percentage of adults (16+) who smoke to 22% by 2010, ASH Scotland Chief Executive Sheila Duffy said:

“While it’s disappointing that the decline of smoking prevalence has fallen just short of the Government’s target of 22% by 2010, we need to remember just how far we have come. In 1999, nearly 31% of the adult population were smokers, so to be where we are today with less than one quarter of adults in Scotland smoking is still something that we can be proud of as a nation.

“Because smoking is still one of Scotland’s biggest killers, responsible for a quarter of all adult deaths, we need to keep up the pressure at both the local and national level to ensure the successes we’ve had over the last decade in reducing prevalence don’t stagnate.

“This is why we’re looking forward to the Government’s plans for a new, comprehensive, evidence-based, tobacco control strategy that will lead Scotland towards a tobacco-free future and continue to drive down smoking rates.”