About the Blog Author-John R. Hughes, MD
John R. Hughes, MD is Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Family Practice at the University of Vermont. Dr. Hughes is board certified in Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry. His major focus has been clinical research on tobacco use. Dr. Hughes received the Ove Ferno Award for research in nicotine dependence and the Alton Ochsner Award Relating Smoking and Health. He is a co-founder and past president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and the Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence. Dr. Hughes has been Chair of the Vermont Tobacco Evaluation and Review Board which oversees VT’s multi-million dollar tobacco control programs. He has over 400 publications on nicotine and other drug dependencies and is one of the world’s most cited tobacco scientist. Dr. Hughes has been a consultant on tobacco policy to the World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the White House. His current research is on how tobacco users and marijuana users stop or reduce use on their own, novel methods to prompt quit attempts by such users, whether smoking cessation reduces reward sensitivity and whether stopping e-cigarettes causes withdrawal. Dr Hughes has received fees from companies who develop smoking cessation devices, medications and services, from governmental and academic institutions, and from public and private organizations that promote tobacco control.
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Do Ex-smokers Return to Normal?
We all have been at cocktail parties and heard innumerable stories of how smokers quit. Often we will hear former smokers say they can’t believe they ever smoked and have no desire at all to return to smoking; others say they have to remain vigilant because they still have desires to smoke at times. I recently published what is, I think, the first paper to try to quantify this. In an internet survey of 403 smokers who had been abstinent for 1-10 years (Hughes, NTR 12:459-462, 2010), 59% said they had a desire to smoke in the last year and 42% of these (or 25% of all former smokers) had a desire in the last week. Overall 9% of smokers said they had a craving that.....