Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011 as news about Tabex and the cytisine trial published that month; availability, licensing and prescription rules for cytisine have changed in several countries since.
The Bulgarian company Sopharma has put on sale a drug that triples the chances of giving up smoking for at least a year. It is backed by a study from more than 40 years ago showing that the drug causes no additional harm to health, which, according to recent studies, nicotine-based treatments can do.
The drug, sold under the brand name TABEX, contains no nicotine. Its active ingredient is cytisine, a substance obtained from laburnum seeds.
Professor Robert West, of Cancer Research UK, has confirmed that the treatment is three times more effective than conventional treatments. He also criticized the fact that, after 40 years on the market in some countries, including parts of Eastern Europe, some governments still put so many obstacles in the way of making it available on prescription.
After a long legal battle, Sopharma has obtained a license to sell the product online.
The latest study, carried out by Professor Robert West himself and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was based on a trial with 740 patients, who took between 2 and 6 pills a day for 25 days. After the treatment, 8.4% managed to stay away from cigarettes for more than 12 months. In percentage terms, that makes it 59.6% more effective than nicotine-based treatments.
Our own conclusion is that, since the tobacco industry itself started investing in the pharmaceutical industry, this new drug could translate into losses for both industries, and therefore into lost tax revenue for governments. That would explain the problems with getting it into pharmacies (assuming the drug really works).
Experts now fear that, because it is only available online, some buyers could fall victim to scammers selling imitations on the internet.
The origins of this drug go back to the Second World War. When the Germans and Russians ran out of tobacco, they used to smoke “golden rain”. A high percentage of the soldiers no longer felt like smoking once they returned home. Golden rain was a plant, laburnum, whose seeds are the source of TABEX’s active ingredient.
Featured image: Roger Culos, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
