Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
Smoking cessation is tricky business - most of the time, people have used nicotine replacement therapy (the patch, the gum, etc) or CNS active drugs (like Wellbutrin/Zyban/Bupropion). None of it works that well - the manufacturers of today's molecule, Chantix, considered it news to brag about when its patients managed to quit smoking at 44% over 12 weeks (vs 18% for placebo recipients).
Chantix, however, works on a different mechanism, so it's at least notable. It's a partial agonist-antagonist - that is, it tickles the relevant receptor a little, but also blocks action at that receptor. In this sense it's much like methadone for smoking cessation.
Email this entry to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry
Comments
FWIW, I found a good way to stop using tobacco (Swedish moist chewing tobacco). Move to someplace where you have no ingrained habits of use, where none of your using friends live and preferably where your preferred tobacco is not available. Osaka, Japan, in my case.
Now that may not be the most practical of solutions, but it does enforce something I believe alcoholism treatment emphasizes: you're more likely to start drinking again if you keep going to places where you used to drink, spend time with people you used to drink with and go to places where alcohol is readily available.
The same goes for tobacco use. In addition to smoking cessation products you may need to be resigned to no longer go to thatfavourite after-work bar; or sit with your friends in the smoking section during your coffee break; or perhaps not even drink coffee anymore if you normally accompany that with a cigarette.
Posted by: Janne | November 19, 2007 11:12 PM
Chlorisondamine - one pill, one cured nictoine addict. Horrible! Chronic (defective) treatment gestates net retained earnings.
Posted by: Uncle Al | November 20, 2007 11:18 AM
I always wondered...if nicotine is the pleasurable part of smoking, why not just start with the gums or the lozenges? It would save you all that pesky emphysema and cancer, and you still get the nicotine buzz!
I guess they are expensive buggers...And pulling out your pack of nicotine gum just doesn't have the same bad ass vibe as smoking.
Posted by: Vince Noir | November 20, 2007 12:46 PM
I just stumbled over this account where it says that it also makes violent.
Posted by: olchemist | December 3, 2007 6:12 PM