The Treatment of Cigarette Smokers

It is a sad statistic that only about one in four people who receive treatment for cigarette smoking / nicotine dependency is still not smoking one year later. The great majority of people will relapse within a period of just a few months. The success rate for smoking cessation programs is not very much different from that for beating heroin addiction or alcoholism. Cigarette smoking is widely recognised as a form of drug abuse in which nicotine is the critical drug. As a form of drug abuse, cigarette smoking has much in common with other forms of illicit drug and substance abuse including cocaine and heroin.

These observations have major implications for how cigarette smokers should be treated. Hopefully, as these implications are considered they will help to improve the efficacy of all kinds of quit smoking treatment programs. The position taken in this article, that cigarette smoking is a form of drug abuse, is based on a huge amount of evidence with regard to the overwhelming importance of the role nicotine takes in relationship to the smoking habit or addiction. It is consistent with the position taken by the World Health Organization, the International Union against Cancer, and official bodies in the United States such as the United States Public Health Service and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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