Heather Selin, Policy Consultant, Smoking and Health Action Foundation Smoking cessation is the single largest focus of tobacco control research. While research has increased the success rates of cessation interventions, cessation programmers remain frustrated by the rate of progress in increasing overall quit rates.
Few smokers enter into formal programs.
The issue, then, is not of building a better wheel, but ensuring that more people either use the existing wheel or find other modes of transport. The answer lies in a broader approach to cessation. Population-based gains in cessation cannot be realized if strategies only reach a minority of the population. Unfortunately, cessation has been discussed almost exclusively outside the realm of policy. The result is that progress has been much slower than it could be.