Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT)

The patch, nicotine gum, nicotine inhaler. Used them? Still smoking? This is not surprising; the odds were against you from the start.

Let’s ask an obvious question that apparently is not so obvious because hundreds of people have told us, yes, it makes sense, but they’d never thought of it that way. Do we give heroin or cocaine addicts drug-laced gum to get them off the needle? Do we suggest that an alcohol patch will double success for a problem drinker?

Of course not! And yet millions upon millions of smokers are being told daily through advertising, by health care providers, or people who know virtually nothing about the smoking addiction that if they use nicotine in a different form (NRT), they’ll lose their desire for nicotine!

Doesn’t make sense, does it? Oh, on the surface, it sounds plausible. To quote fellow counsellor, Joel Spitzer, “Nicotine replacement therapy’s argument is that it buys time to recondition the habit. If it is so effective, then why are we not giving alcohol to alcoholics so they can break their bottle-to-mouth habit?”

To further quote Mr. Spitzer (with his permission).

“Are the advertisements leading smokers to believe that most smokers who buy and use NRT products are successful in quitting? Listen closely the next time an ad comes on television. They all use two key words—NRT will “double” your chances of quitting because NRT has been proven “effective.” What does “effective” mean, who paid to prove it, and what are we doubling? If 90 percent of NRT users were successful in quitting for one full year, that would be “effective.” But what if NRT has a 90 percent failure rate, would that be “effective”? Of course not!

“Then why are pharmaceutical companies, health organizations and government telling smokers that NRT is “effective”? The truth is, about nine out of ten NRT users don’t make it to the Promised Land. Where do they turn after their hopes are shattered?

“We’re told to read the fine print if we want to know the truth. Does a smoker who relies on NRT as their “last, best hope,” have a right to know that almost nine in ten NRT quitters fail? Try and think like a pharmaceutical company. If you had to tell smokers that unless they participated in a clinic or group to complement their use of NRT, they were almost surely doomed to fail, would they continue to buy your product? Would you continue to make billions by selling nicotine to nicotine addicts?

“The truth is, NRT is not effective and contrary to all the hype, it is not a smoker’s last, best hope of freedom! You can’t buy education in a pill or patch. We need to bathe the smoker’s desire in motivation, feed it a sound addiction education and then wrap it snugly and support it against relapse for life.

“Not only is NRT taking credit for its own glory, it takes credit for the three percent who would have made it to a year anyway, without NRT’s help. How effective does that make NRT? Will smokers put their hope and dollars into a product that gives zero benefit to 18 out of 20 who use it?

“There are programs and support-groups experiencing 50 percent and better long-term success rates—without NRT. If health organizations really want to help smokers, they need to study the successful support-groups. We shouldn’t create false hope or discard proven methods when NRT generates nine losers for every winner.

“When smokers quit, their blood becomes nicotine-free within 72 hours. There are scores of studies com-paring success rates of nicotine-free quitters to NRT users. Sadly, none of the studies compare apples to apples. Instead of comparing nicotine-fed quitters (NRT) to nicotine-free quitters (no nicotine at 72 hours), they watch as a very high percentage of cold turkey quitters relapse before completing week one, and then use those relapses to claim that NRT is “effective.”

“Government uses questionable studies to conclude that all nicotine addicts should be fed massive doses of nicotine. Why have these scientists ignored the fact in every NRT study; the quitters who remained nicotine-free at the end of three months out-performed three-month NRT quitters after a year?

“It’s my opinion that the tremendous “superiority” of NRT over cold turkey is probably the biggest fraud perpetrated upon smokers [italics ours] since the 1940's tobacco ads that used physicians to convince smokers that one brand was healthier than another.”