Smoking Cessation : Recent Indicators of What ’ s Working at a Population Level

Cessation is often examined at the individual level in order to determine the effects of cessation interventions or to define individual predictors of who will or will not be successful in their cessation attempts. However, for these individual effects to create a substantive public health benefit, they must sum to create a significant change at the population level. Powerful interventions that affect only a few individuals will have little impact on disease rates, whereas weaker interventions that impact large numbers of smokers will have important and cumulative effects on disease rates. In addition, many interventions (e.g., price increases, changes in social norms, etc.) are delivered to the population as a whole rather than to individual smokers one at a time, and it is these population-based interven­ tions that have formed the core of the tobacco control efforts currently underway in California, Massachusetts, and several other states.