Simon Chapman of the School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Australia, evaluated 511 studies with NRTs and concluded that 51 per cent of industry-sponsored studies attributed NRTs with a major contribution to smoking cessation, compared with only 22 per cent of non-sponsored studies.

Still by far the most effective way to stop smoking is the “cold turkey” approach, despite massive promotional investment by pharmaceutical companies, including the homepages of anti-smoking organisations, suggesting to the public that NRT therapy is required for successful cessation. The paper goes on to say that today's largest tobacco markets are nations with massive populations on low incomes for whom pharmacotherapy is prohibitively expensive. In Indonesia for example, 3 months of NRT costs as much as 7 year's supply of cigarettes, placing NRT totally out of the reach of all but the wealthy. NRT would thus seem to be largely irrelevant to population-wide cessation goals in many low- and middle-income nations. (pi)