Tobacco and Public Health - TCSC Indonesia

medications for OTC sale in 1996, the use of nicotine medications has increased by
152% compared with prior prescription use (Shiffman et al. 1997).
In many countries NRT products are now available OTC. One of the reasons for
this is that using ANDS is safe and dependence is very unlikely. The consequences of
the OTC status is the facilitation of access and encouraging smokers to use ANDS.
The number of quit attempts is also increasing (Kunze et al. 1998).
Some countries also see NRT products being delivered by means of general sales.
Experiences with this kind of distribution need to be monitored and evaluated at
a later stage.
Conclusions
Useful smoking cessation treatments are available. However, they need to be made
more available and to be used more aggressively. Higher dosing needs to be considered,
especially for patients for whom abstinence is not the likely outcome. Reduced smoking
is better than heavy smoking. Cessation services need to be institutionalized more
widely and the health professions, in particular, must set examples.
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