Talk about impossible, according to a July 2013 Gallup poll, after 30 years on the market and billions spent marketing Nicorette, only 1 in 100 U.S. ex-smokers credit nicotine gum for their success. It found that only a tiny fraction of all successful quitters had used any type of approved quitting product (just 8 percent), that more smokers quit smoking cold turkey than by all other methods combined.

The Gallup Poll strongly suggests that Nicorette nicotine gum is a deadly quitting fraud and sham that has undercut and delayed cessation for millions, and has likely cost thousands upon thousands of smokers their lives.

In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Nicorette and Nicoderm, plead guilty to 3 criminal counts of health care fraud associated with Wellbutrin and Paxil, and agreed to pay $2 billion toward helping resolve victim liabilities. But when it comes to sham quitting products repeatedly robbing smokers of priceless periods of cessation confidence, how do we give Neal T. Curtis's 12 year-old daughter her father back?

GlaxoSmithKline's primary quitting fraud has been advertisements and commercials asserting that its nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products double “your” chances.

GlaxoSmithKline can read. It knows that every independent, long-term, population level quitting method effectiveness study over the past decade has shown that attempting to quit while using the nicotine patch, gum or lozenge is less effective than quitting unassisted and on-your-own.

The U.S. government's only known real-world quitting method effectiveness assessment was conducted in 2006 and featured on February 7, 2007 in a front-page Wall Street Journal article entitled “NICOTINE FIX - Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry.”

Conducted by the National Cancer Institute, the study (Hartman NCI 2006) found that among 8,200 real-world quitters at 9+ months after quitting, that those quitting without using the nicotine gum, patch, lozenge or Zyban did 12 percent better. Better!

Also in 2006, GSK saw an Australian study (Doran 2006) which followed the smoking patients of 1,000 family practice physicians. In addition to finding cold turkey twice as effective as the nicotine gum, patch or inhaler, it found that a whopping 88 percent of all successful quitters quit smoking cold turkey.

GlaxoSmithKline has known since at least

Findings that unassisted quitting is substantially effective than toying with the nicotine patch, gum or lozenge hold true whether a light smoker or a heavy smoker (Pierce 2012)

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I, John R. Polito, am solely responsible for the content of this article. Any error brought to my attention will be immediately corrected.

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