Rationale  » Safety of Integrated Tobacco Dependence Treatment

Safety of Integrated Tobacco Dependence Treatment

Despite frequently voiced concerns that treating tobacco dependence at the same time as other chemical dependencies jeopardizes sobriety, research fails to bear that out:

• Campbell et al. (1995) found no evidence that their participants (66 inpatient, outptatient and methadone patients) who were either successful or unsuccessful at smoking cessation relapsed to other substances in any significant numbers.
  
  
• Martin et al.'s (1997) study of 205 recovering alcohol and drug abusers with 3 months of continuous abstinence found that the stress of quitting smoking does not appear to prompt relapses to alcohol and drug use.
  
  
• Concurrent intervention for nicotine dependence did not significantly harm treatment outcomes of patients using alcohol or marijuana as their drug of choice (Joseph et al., 1993; 314 substance abuse inpatients with 8-21 months follow-up).
  
  
• Nicotine dependence treatment, provided as part of addictive disorders treatment, enhanced smoking cessation and did not have a substantial adverse effect on abstinence from the non-nicotine drug of dependence (Hurt et al., 1994; inpatient substance abusers with 1 year outcome).
  

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