Okay: two developments worth a mention, especially the second one.

Number One:

Now that my book has been added to the Borders on-line catalogue, you can now order it from any Borders store - which is great, because not everybody likes buying goods over the internet, do they?  So I went into Borders in Stockport yesterday to test the system, see how long it took to actually get the book. 

[UPDATE: They called me on the 28th to say it was in, so it took exactly ten days.]

I asked the lady at the Information Desk if they had the book in stock or if I could order it, handing her a note that said: Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was by Chris Holmes ISBN No. 9780955682902.

She checked on the system, and said that they didn’t have it in stock - which I already knew - but that their suppliers reckoned they would have some in by next Tuesday.  She told me it was a Print On Demand title too, so she should have realised that their suppliers were really only saying that - the whole point of Print On Demand is that no-one has to print or carry stock!  They only print copies if they are ordered, yet she gave me the note back and said lamely: “Do you want to wait until next Tuesday, and see if they’ve got some in?”

Wow, that’s some sales technique you’ve got there, lady!  You should run courses!  You were going to let me walk out of the store without ordering anything, when I already asked you if I could order it!  What’s the matter with you, don’t you want to sell my book?

So I said: “No, I’d like to order it now, please!” because I knew that if I didn’t do that, their supplier wouldn’t bother doing anything at all, quite rightly.  So she printed out a ticket and I was sent over to the tills to pay for it.  They took my contact details, promised to phone me when the book was ready to be picked up and gave me a printed  order form which I would have to produce when I collected the paperback in due course.  But when I looked at the title, it said: “Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was Volume”.  And sure enough, when I checked on the Borders on-line catalogue, that’s what it says: Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was Volume by Chris Holmes.  As indeed it does on twenga.co.uk too, evidently a subsidiary.

Now I know how this has happened:  the full title is: Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was.  Volume I: The Biggest Medical Mistake of the 20th Century.  Which is a bit long, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t appear in it’s full form every time it gets mentioned - which is increasingly often, I’m happy to say.  Usually, though, it gets shortened to Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was, because that at least makes sense!  But “The Drug That Never Was Volume”?  What idiot typed that into a cataloguing system, and never stopped to think that it sounded a bit… well, wrong, frankly!  So well done Borders - and by the way, the other twelve on-line catalogues all got it right, so yes it IS just you and your buddies at twenga.  And if an Indian website can get it all correct - where one might assume a linguistic error could occur - I don’t see why Borders can’t (landmarkonthenet.com, price listed as 1851 rupees!)

Number Two:

The Department of Stealth

Back in January I was contacted by Belinda Cunnison from the freedom2choose organisation, letting me know that they were investigating the NHS claim that you are “four times more likely to succeed” in quitting smoking with the NHS, and wondering if I knew about any published studies that could back up that claim. The thought was that advertising standards may be breached by the slogan.

Since this picks up on a point I made in the Evidence section of this site, and in the book, we decided to pursue it.  In 1992, a report from the University of Iowa looking at different quit methods put the success rate of willpower alone at 6%.  By that standard, “Four times more likely to succeed” would imply that around 24% of smokers using the NHS Smoking Cessation Services would successfully stop smoking, and not just temporarily!

The Bogus Short-Term ‘Success’ Rates

For years, the Department of Health and the NHS have been using a system for measuring success which is frankly laughable - or it would be, if they weren’t using it to justify giving vast sums of taxpayers’ money to the drug companies for Nicotine Replacement Poisoning. If you attend those NHS services, and report not smoking for a period of only four weeks, they will chalk you up as an official success!  This has led to ludicrously high ’success’ rates being reported and published by the DoH and the NHS as if they were the real story: the document I’ve reproduced on this site dated 9/7/04 credits Kent and Medway SHA with 72% success and South West Kent PCT at 90%!  I accused the Department of Stealth of seriously misleading the public about the effectiveness of those services by doing this, and I stand by that accusation.  Not even a smoking cessation wizard such as myself would claim a 90% success rate, not unless you are screening some clients out before you start!  For the NHS to claim such success rates is preposterous, those people aren’t even therapists, they are merely advisers, counsellors if you like.  Everyone knows they don’t have a success rate of anything like that magnitude.  But does everyone know how truly useless they are?

The Real, Long-Term Quit Rates and The Missing Report

The 2004 document I mentioned above also summarises the ‘findings’ of the one and only DoH-commissioned report into the long-term effectiveness of the NHS Stop Smoking Services.  The study was done by Glasgow University and looked at the outcomes at 52 weeks.  It was originally published in the journal Addiction - where smokers and taxpayers were bound to see it, obviously - and since then it seems to have disappeared without a trace.  Although the document I have reproduced suggests that it can be found by following a link at the end of the article, in fact there is no such link.

In the DoH summary, it is claimed that “15% remain quit at 52 weeks”, which sounds like a 15% success rate, doesn’t it? Yet in the book I quote a number of independent studies which find that the real outcomes of smokers using Nicotine Replacement products is somewhere between 5% and 8%.  On this site and in the book I point to the word “remain” as the suspicious factor here.

Across the U.K., the short-term NHS quit rate (based on self-report at four weeks) averages out at 55%.  So if you take 15% of those people - not 15% of the total treated - you get back to the equivalent of 8% long-term quitters for the entire number of smokers using the NHS Service.  But 8% doesn’t sound very good, does it?  Especially if willpower achieves 6% anyway!  It begins to look like abject failure and a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money, doesn’t it?  Just like I said in the book, in fact.

So I’ve raised the question: Have the Department of Health sneakily used the term: “15% remain quit” to suggest 15% of the people using the services, when it really means only 15% of those who reported success at  four weeks, which is only 8% in reality?

We have decided to find out for sure.  Belinda got on to the Department of Health and asked them why there was no link to this crucial report on their website, and could they kindly send us a copy of it?  She also advised them that she was trying to ascertain whether or not it was true that smokers are four times more likely to quit with the NHS.  On 3rd February she received an email from Barry Davis at the DoH, apologising for the fact that the link was not on their website and promising to get that corrected.  Then he added that he had provided the link in the attachment to the email.

Hang on, though! There was no attachment!

So Belinda got back to him again, explaining that there was no attachment.  “Oh silly me,” said Barry, or words to that effect, “here is a copy of the document you requested.  Hope everything is now okay”.   So she read it, but it didn’t seem to say anything about long-term quit rates.  She asked Barry about that, and forwarded a copy to me.  I read it carefully.

It was the wrong report entirely!

So Belinda has pointed out to Barry that this report, lovely though it is, plainly says nothing about the long-term results of the NHS Stop Smoking Services, the very thing we were asking about in fact.  So as soon as we hear from Barry again, we shall let you know whether this is incompetence (which is bad) or a cover-up at the expense of taxpayers’ millions and smokers’ lives. Truth Will Out, won’t it?  We’ll make sure of it, actually.  Watch this space.

Filed under: Nicotine, Smoking, The Book, The Campaign by Chris