Research Letter The Most “Successful ” Method for Failing to Quit Smoking Is Unassisted Cessation

There has been a spate of high-profile commentaries recently arguing against the promotion of clinical interventions to help smokers to stop (Chapman & MacKenzie, 2010, 2012). One argument used by these authors is that unaided quit attempts are effective because many former smokers report to have quit without help (Chapman & Wakefield, 2012). This argu-ment is based on a logical fallacy, which ought to be obvious, but clearly is not. To help demonstrate the point, we report here the prevalence of methods used by smokers whose quit attempt failed. Methods We used data from the Smoking Toolkit Study (STS). The STS is a monthly series of cross-sectional household surveys of nationally representative samples of adults aged 16 and above in England, including current, former, and never smokers (Fidler et al., 2011). England is a country with probably the highest rates of assisted cessation globally. For the purpose of this analysis, the dataset was restricted to those 9,274 smokers reporting to have made a quit attempt in the past 12 months but who had gone back to smoking by the time of the inter-view (i.e., the quit attempt had failed). We used data collecte