For Immediate Release

RELEASED ON JANUARY 23, 2020

The Surgeon General has led global efforts to end smoking for over 50 years. The latest report, focused on smoking cessation, is long overdue. Each year, tobacco use kills 7 million people worldwide. Improving adult cessation rates is the only way to reduce death and disease from tobacco within the next 15 years.

For the past 30 years, the Surgeon General has failed to focus on smoking cessation. The World Health Organization has, in fact, documented that there has been little progress in providing smokers with affordable, accessible, and effective cessation options. Meanwhile, the number of smokers has grown to 1 billion worldwide.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, almost 70% of smokers in the U.S. want to quit and nearly half of all smokers have tried to quit in the last year. Unfortunately, only about 4% of smokers will be successful. The 2018 EY Parthenon report, “Smoking Cessation Product and Services: Global Landscape Analysis,” found that solutions currently on the market are successful in helping only a small percentage of smokers quit, and that there are very few novel solutions in the pipeline. Failure to expand access to effective cessation tools—including medications, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and e-cigarettes—hampers progress toward ending the harms of tobacco.

Michael Russell, a leading cessation researcher and inventor of nicotine gum, famously said: “People smoke for the nicotine but die from the tar.” NRTs, such as gums and skin patches, were therefore developed as way to deliver nicotine without deadly tar. These innovations were the first tobacco harm reduction products.

Other reduced risk nicotine products (e-cigarettes, snus, nicotine pouches) also have roles to play in ending smoking and are more readily embraced by smokers as alternatives to cigarettes than NRTs. Research has shown that when smokers switch to these products, they reduce their health risks. Furthermore, clinical trials have shown that e-cigarettes are a more effective means of quitting cigarettes than NRTs.

Creating a smoke-free world will require more than compassion and education. It will require innovation. We are supporting scientists and researchers around the world to identify novel therapies that will increase quit rates. A variety of options must be available to smokers because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Tailored approaches to cessation are required, for example, to help smokers who live in low- and middle-income countries and those with mental health conditions. We hope that this Surgeon General’s report will spur much-needed innovation.

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