How to get a smoker addicted to quitting

In the last decades, the negative effects of cigarette smoking resulted in a significant increase in chronic cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, cancer and preventable deaths. Already in the early 1960s, the ‘Dutch antismoking doctor’ Lenze Meinsma, an oncologist who performed his PhD on the health risks of smoking, warned that smoking is extremely harmful for your health [1]. However, at that time smoking was very common in the Netherlands with over 90% of men smokers. Meinsma became director of the Dutch Cancer Society (1953–1978) campaigning tirelessly against smoking, but for a long time he was ignored and seen as a ‘fanatic’. Yet in 1971 he finally got support from four scientific associations for medical consultants: cardiologists, internists, ear, nose, and throat specialists, and lung specialists. On Christmas eve 1974 the Dutch expert centre on tobacco control STIVORO was founded, a collaboration of the Dutch Asthma Fund, Dutch Cancer Society, and the Netherlands Heart Foundation. STIVORO took the lead in launching the first government subsidised campaigns against smoking. It was not until 1982 that government health warnings on cigarette packets became obligatory and it took much longer before smoking was prohibited at work (Tobacco Act 1990) and in enclosed public spaces and buildings (Tobacco Act 2002). The proportion of male smokers started to decline from about 95% in the late 1960s to 36.7% in 1997 [2]. The proportion of female smokers initially increased from about 30% in the 1960s to beyond 40% in