The graphic that comes with Kevin Helliker's front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled NICOTINE FIX- Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry; Government Guidelines Don't Push Cold Turkey; Advisers' Company Ties[1] compares the success rates in quitting smoking of those who quit cold-turkey versus those who relied on medications. It shows, first, that almost as many ex-smokers who quit "cold turkey" as ex-smokers who relied on anti-smoking medications are still off cigarettes 3 months after quitting. Additionally, more "cold turkey" ex-smokers are still off after 9 months than users of anti-smoking medications. These two facts form a profound and powerful indictment of the entire smoking-cessation sector of Big Pharma.
The aphenomenality of smoking-cessation pharmaceuticals lies in the assumption that smoking is a habit requiring external intervention to break. This is the assumption that becomes the premise for product development and marketing.
Smoking as a mass habit is widely blamed on becoming addicted to nicotine. A more complete statement of the case is more something like the following:
From the mid-1950s, after the Khrushchev group replaced the Stalin and his circle, the U.S. ruling circles were consumed with intensifying all forms of competition --- military and otherwise --- with the Soviet Union. The aim was to force the latter into a crisis that would bring it crashing down. The U.S. ruling circles had numerous and extensive ambitions beyond U.S. territory which they wanted to pursue without hindrance. The main hindrance these ambitions faced on the home front, among U.S. citizens, was the existing level of participation of the American public in political affairs. This was much higher than the authorities liked. Maximum consumerism was thus developed to serve both the anti-Soviet and the pro-U.S. imperial aims. Middle-class standards of high consumption were encouraged with the aim of wiping out and eventually displacing mass participation in the political process at any level within the United States, and to reinforce propaganda representations of the Soviet bloc as uniformly dingy, stodgy, unmodern, without household appliances, etc.
Meeting these standards, however, imposed ever-increasing levels of personal anxiety on individuals trying to handle the accompanying stresses at the place of work, at home and in social intercourse. One index of this increased general level of societal and individual stress could be seen in the rapid rise in sales of drugs to handle mood and appetite -- tranquilisers, vitamins etc. Noting this trend, Big Tobacco consciously set out to transform the cigarette into a nicotine delivery system, ensuring profits from generation to generation.
Einstein pointed out that the thinking that got one into a problem was not going to get one out. Sure enough, as the evidence served up by the Wall Street Journal exposé confirms, the thinking that the medical science bought and paid for by one massive concentration of capital resources to hook people on nicotine delivered in cancer-causing cigarettes could be redeployed by some other concentration of capital resources to "help" people "stop" smoking profitably has not gotten the society out of the problem of massive concentrations of capital usurping the public's right to good health in the first place.
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Note
1.Wall Street Journal subscribers only may access this article online.
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