NHS ‘should subsidise NRT’

Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest) has argued that the government should spend less money on advertising campaigns targeted at smokers and instead use these funds to subsidise nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for those that want it.

These comments follow a recent study by School of Public Health at Harvard reporting that many major brands of cigarettes had increased the amount of nicotine in each cigarette by around 11 per cent from 1997 to 2005.

Neil Rafferty, a spokesperson for Forest, stated that an eight to ten week course of NRT can be very expensive.

“If the government is really serious about this kind of thing then they need to look at that rather than running pointless advertising campaigns,” he said.

He added that existing support for smokers looking to quit was “patchy” at present and that the government was wasting millions of pounds on advertising campaigns which could be better spend on providing improved support and subsidised NRT.

Forest was founded in 1979 by Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris and is funded mainly by tobacco companies, though claims to represent the interests of smokers, rather than the tobacco industry.

Last year, Forest launched a failed campaign to influence parliament to vote against the ban on smoking in public places which will be implemented in July.