As “No Tobacco Month” begins this Wednesday, pharmacists and tobacco specialists observe that the consumption of oral nicotine substitutes has increased sharply since 2019 and their reimbursement on prescription.
Thierry, retired, stopped smoking seven years ago, after 40 years of cigarettes. But today, he can no longer go out without his chewing gum or nicotine substitute tablets: he consumes around twenty per day. “Generally, I finish a lozenge, I take a chewing gum, I finish a chewing gum, I take a lozenge, he confides. When you are a smoker, you will always have a pack of cigarettes, you will travel tens of kilometers on Sunday to find a pack. And there, my anxiety is not having any chewing gum or lozenges”.
It is impossible to say how many ex-smokers are in the same situation as Thierry, because they are not listed. But pharmacist Théodore Henrique confirms selling more nicotine substitutes on a daily basis since 2019 and their reimbursement on prescription.“We see the prescriptions passing by, he explainsbut there are also people who come to buy them without the prescription, because they need them in the long term for their withdrawal which can last more or less long.”
“Others come quite regularly to buy large quantities. There are even people who feel a little guilty about buying them.”
A pharmacistat franceinfo
Nicotine, addictive but non-toxic
Guilt is also what Ivan Berlin, a tobacco doctor at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, sometimes sees. He estimates that 30 to 40% of his patients who stopped smoking with these products and use them for a long time, sometimes several decades. If the dependence is strong for some, it is because the substitutes deliver an immediate “shot” of nicotine. “These forms of nicotine lead to nicotine concentrations in the blood, therefore in the brain, quite quickly and are very similar to what we see with cigarettes,” recalls the tobacco specialist.
But unlike cigarettes, there is no danger, assures Professor Daniel Thomas, spokesperson for the French-speaking tobacco society. “Nicotine is not the toxic substance that tobacco is, it is the substance that makes you ‘addicted’ to tobacco. It is not nicotine that causes tobacco-related illnesses, nor cancer, nor “heart attack… If we stay with the product that made you dependent on tobacco, but which is not toxic, it doesn’t matter”.
Ivan Berlin still calls for investment in research in order to find new ways to get rid of nicotine consumption. As of November 1, 126,370 French people have already registered for “No Tobacco Month”, an initiative led since its launch in 2016 by Public Health France and the Ministry of Health.