Overflight, 45

Many doctors encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry, the Government, the medical establishment, the NHS, ASH and QUIT, actually prescribe nicotine in order to help smokers escape from nicotine addiction. They call it NICOTINE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (NRT). I'm referring to products that contain nicotine, such as gum, patches, inhalers and sprays, which claim to help smokers to quit. The expression itself is, of course, a falsehood. The nicotine isn't replaced! On the contrary, it is maintained and there is no therapy.
But the market for nicotine maintenance – now worth more than a billion dollars a year – is so great that people will try anything just to get a slice of it. …
Pharmaceutical companies use their vast wealth to fund conferences into tobacco and nicotine. They pay doctors to do the clinical studies and they even define what success means in those studies. They aren't interested in getting people off nicotine. How can they be, if their first obligation is to their shareholders and they are making a fortune by selling nicotine? …
The very term Nicotine Replacement Therapy is a misnomer. Nicotine is not being replaced and there is nothing therapeutic about it. It should be called Nicotine Continuation Treatment. It is not in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies to cure nicotine addiction – they are selling nicotine! …
As we have seen, more money is spent in the US promoting drugs to doctors than is spent by all the medical schools combined in educating them. In the UK, the parliamentary inquiry into the industry's influence found the Department of Health spends around £4.5 million a year providing independent medicines information to prescribers. This, they said, represents 0.3 per cent of the approximately £1.65 billion a year that the pharmaceutical industry spends promoting their drugs to doctors. …