State and community tobacco-control programs and smoking-cessation rates among adult smokers: what can we learn from the COMMIT intervention cohort?

PURPOSE To assess the long-term effect of a randomized community-based trial of smoking cessation and to examine the effect of exposure to large state-based tobacco-control programs on smoking cessation. DESIGN Longitudinal tobacco-use telephone surveys conducted in 1988, 1993, and 2001. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Baseline smokers (6603) from 20 communities in 9 states completed a survey in 2001 (35% of the original sample). INTERVENTION The Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation (COMMIT) intervention was a randomized community-based smoking-cessation intervention between 1988 and 1993. In addition, cohort data were used to evaluate quasi-experimental differences in the strength of state-level tobacco control programs and policies. MEASURES Multivariate logistic regression was used to compare quit rates among those who were exposed to community- or state-level tobacco-control programming and those who were not between 1988 and 2001. RESULTS Quit rates were higher in the COMMIT intervention communities during the period when the trial was funded (Relative Risk [RR] = 1.19) but were no different than comparison communities 8 years later after funding stopped. Quit rates were highest in those communities in states with both strong tobacco-control policies and aggressive tobacco-control programs, such as California and Massachusetts (RR = 1.44) compared with those communities in states that had little tobacco-control activity, such as Iowa, New Mexico, and North Carolina. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that well-funded tobacco-control programming coupled with tobacco-control policies may be associated with increases in cessation rates.