“Nicotine Replacement Therapies”

Conclusion

In this short chapter we wanted to make three important points with regard to the so-called nicotine replacement therapies. Firstly, the efficacy of such treatments is very modest, compared to many non-chemical methods of smoking cessation. Secondly, a comparison with methadone maintenance treatment for heroin addiction shows that at no level can the presumed similarity between the two types of treatment be sustained. Hence, our conclusion is that the two types of interventions operate by entirely different mechanisms. Finally, we propose three mechanisms that can account for the modest effect of NRTs on smoking withdrawal. None of these mechanisms requires the assumption that smoking is driven by nicotine addiction. In the next chapter, we revisit the first of these mechanisms, namely the satiation effected by nicotine toxicity.