It is a big business in this country treating people suffering from the negative health effects of smoking. In fact, as a preventable public health problem, it accounts for more spending than anything else, and that is including obesity. The total associated health care costs of smoking are estimated to be about $138 billion a year. Thus, when a new way to help smokers quit is found, people tend to pay attention.

Traditionally, the options for a smoker attempting to quit endangering his or her health are limited to an often expensive mix of nicotine patches, nicotine gums, and a drug known as Chantix (or varenicline). Now, however, there is increasing talk about a drug that is cheaper than each of the aforementioned treatments and which has been in use since the 1960s. According to studies, the drug cytisine works just as well as any of the traditional treatments, and yet many American doctors are not even aware of its existence.

Cytisine, in one recent study, was found to have helped 40 percent of smokers quit after one month of use as compared to 31 percent who used nicotine-replacement therapy for the same amount of time. At intervals of time up to 6 months, more cytisine users were still smoke-free which implies the drug is even more effective at preventing relapses.

According to the American Lung Association (ALA), 392,000 people in the U.S. die each year from tobacco-related causes. Add to that the 50,000 people who die each year of exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke and it is no wonder that groups like the ALA encourage people to stop smoking, whatever the course of action may be. Furthermore, it should be no surprise that the ALA has expressed its support for any method of smoking cessation that is cheaper and will thus be more widely available.

The cost of cytisine in a standard one-month supply as compared to a one-month supply of Chantix is much cheaper, $25 as compared to $300 respectively. When the low cost of the drug is considered with its effectiveness, many are wondering why it is not already easily accessible to the smoking public.

Cytisine, a plant-based extract of acacia seeds, has been in use for 40 years in many parts of Eastern Europe. However, this also means that many of the studies and drug-trials that tout the drug’s effectiveness are not in English and studies that recommend dosing specifics are hard to find. To a lesser extent, the drug’s side-effects, which are similar to Chantix,  include nightmares, nausea, vomiting, although side-effects should not be considered too substantial a boundary when it is taken into consideration that 80 percent of those who reported ill side-effects still recommended the drug.

The biggest obstacle, then, to getting cytisine out there to a smoking public that is costing this country billions of dollars in preventable health care spending is knowledge of its existence, its proven effectiveness and its relatively low price. Cytisine is not even FDA-approved for use in the United States.

However, there is hope for the future of smoking cessation. Extab pharmaceuticals, which is licensed to market one of two name-brand forms of cytisine (Tabex), and is backed by an investment company that specializes in little-known drugs, has announced plans to begin clinical trials in the U.S. With total health care spending in this country estimated to cost about 1.6 trillion a year, anything to reduce this number should be welcomed with open arms.