Addiction
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A network of Stop Smoking Services has been set up within the National Health Service (NHS) in England. The services deliver a combination of behavioural support and medication. It is important to establish the degree of variability in quit rates attributable to differences between individual practitioners, to gauge the scope for improvement by training and professional support. The aim of the present analysis was to examine how far short-term quit rates depend on the practitioner delivering the intervention after adjusting for potential confounding variables. ⋯ Individual stop smoking practitioners appear to differ to a significant degree in effectiveness. It is important to examine what underlies these differences in order to improve selection, training and professional development.
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Previous research has shown that a substantial proportion of smokers believe that nicotine causes serious diseases such as cancer, possibly deterring the use of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for smoking cessation or smoking reduction. This study examined beliefs about the harms specifically from long-term use of NRT and associations between these and its use for smoking cessation and smoking reduction. ⋯ A significant minority of smokers in England believe that the use of nicotine replacement therapy for a year or more is harmful. However, belief that long-term nicotine replacement therapy use can cause health harm does not appear to act as a deterrent to using it in a quit attempt or for smoking reduction.
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The rapid emergence of myriad substances openly marketed as 'legal highs' is straining traditional drug control systems which require time and basic scientific data on harms to react, presenting governments with the dilemma of no response or a disproportionate response. Some countries have side-stepped this using novel policy and legislative approaches. Should other countries consider them? ⋯ Every EU country should have existing laws for protecting public health that can be applied swiftly yet proportionately to new drugs appearing on the open market with minimum political involvement. It seems the key is the speed, not the weight, of response. Given support for their enforcement mechanisms, these systems might be as effective and more efficient than the old ones.