Mark Twain once said, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world – I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” This is how Professor Mike Kelly, director of the NICE centre for Public Health, decided to open a press briefing about landmark guidance to reduce tobacco-related harm for people struggling to quit smoking. This guidance, issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), is the first to recommend that licensed nicotine-containing products, such as patches and gum, can be used to help people stop the habit from harming their wellbeing.
Professor Kelly explained, ‘This is the first time anywhere in the world that national guidance will endorse cutting down on smoking with the help of licensed nicotine products as a way to help reduce the harm caused by tobacco. Over 79,000 deaths in England each year are due to smoking tobacco, or in other words that’s roughly 1,500 deaths a week from cigarette smoking. These people smoke for the nicotine but die because of the tar in tobacco.’ He added, ‘We believe the NICE guidance will help smokers get the right support and advice in using these products.’
As someone who helped develop the guidance, Professor Paul Aveyard, a GP and Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Oxford, added, ‘Advisors should reassure people that licensed nicotine-containing products are a safe and effective way of reducing the harm from cigarettes, and that nicotine replacement therapy products have been shown in trials to be safe for at least 5 year’s use. There are no circumstances when it is safer to smoke than to use licensed nicotine containing products and experts believe that lifetime use of these products will be considerably less harmful than smoking.’
According to Sarah Woolnough, Cancer Research UK’s executive director of policy, ‘Smoking still accounts for one in four cancer deaths and nearly a fifth of all cancer cases, so helping those smokers who want to quit or reduce the harm from smoking remains vital. While stopping smoking in one go is most likely to be successful, the use of licensed nicotine containing products provide a useful addition to the smoker’s quitting tool-kit, and we support ready access to these products for people wishing to cut down or stop smoking.’
Professor John Britton, chair of the Royal College of Physicians’ tobacco advisory group, commented, ‘We would encourage all smokers to take up the opportunities presented by this guidance, and if they can’t quit using nicotine altogether, to switch as much as they can to an alternative nicotine product. This guidance has the potential to change millions of lives for the better. We commend it.’
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