Pharmaceutical sponsorship in smoking cessation: Toronto conference, November

Back in April, the World Health Organisation warned health professionals working in tobacco control not to become too involved with pharmaceutical companies. But the horse had already escaped. The creation of a global smoking cessation industry was already in its late stages, and continues to develop apace.

Michael Siegel blogs today on the 7th National Conference on Tobacco or Health being held in Toronto in June with Pfizer as a major sponsor. There is a significant conflict of interest (private v. public), since Pfizer manufactures Champix among other smoking cessation medications. Accepting sponsorship from Pfizer will compromise the integrity of the conference.

In March Siegel wrote a piece about ISPTID: the International Society for the Prevention of Tobacco Induced Diseases, in which he remarked that this society had renounced pharmaceutical funding and declared itself free of all industrial ties (before the advice from WHO had been published in the BMJ). He urges other organisations in this field to follow suit: but it will take a wholesale change for many years before I would have any confidence that the slate was clean of pharmaceutical influence. We know, in addition to the pharma-funded events that Siegel lists, that the major UK conference (UK National Smoking Cessation Conference) relies on pharmaceutical sponsorship.

Grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (a trust part-funded by profits from Johnson & Johnson) can be seen here. The list of grants (using 'tobacco' as a search term) contains some 1,650 entries with over $100,000 awarded for most of them.

It is probable that if all conference organisers wanted to find a willing source of funds for smoking cessation events and they were not permitted to take on pharmaceutical funding, they would find few people willing to come forward, and even fewer with a specific interest in coming forward, year after year in several different locations in any given period.