[Nicotine substitutes: with or without drug prescription?].

Worldwide, the tobacco pandemic is causing 3.5 million deaths per year, including 60,000 in France. The World meeting on Tobacco or Health in 1997 drew the attention on the urgent need for an active policy on smoking cessation to limit the great slaughter of 100 million deaths during the next thirty years. To reach this goal, nicotine replacement therapy has shown its efficacy, doubling the rate of success. Despite advertising for this product their use is very small in France. Medical prescription is the main reason. When the lack of danger of their use by smokers is established, when their maintained efficacy is proven with OTC use, when all decisions of switch has been followed by an increased use, it is necessary that France joins the 11 other European Union countries who already took that decision.