I shall be your next presenter on our current goal of smoking cessation, but I should first like to introduce my fellow presenters, Drs Reuter and Hughes, and my panelists, Drs Hurt, Rand, and Vocci.

Peter Reuter is a professor of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, and head of the social policy specialisation programme there. Before coming to Maryland, Dr Reuter was the co-director of the Drug Policy Research Center of the RAND Corporation, and there he led the multidisciplinary research programme that covered the entire range of drug policy issues from epidemiology to crop eradication. He is one of the harm reduction “warriors”. He has been one of the people that have seen first hand why this is a controversial issue, and he will show that there are some controversies that may apply to tobacco and others that may not as readily apply.

John R Hughes is a professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Family Practice at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He is the current president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and the chair of the nicotine dependence task force and nicotine dependence treatment guidelines committee for the American Psychiatric Association.

Richard D Hurt is the director of the Nicotine Dependence Center and chair of the Division of Community Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He has performed innovative research on effective smoking interventions and has developed a model for what comprehensive smoking cessation in a hospital could be, ranging from inpatient to community intervention approaches.

Cynthia S Rand is an associate professor of Medicine in the School of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. She has been heavily involved in smoking cessation research, including the lung health study, which gave her some special insights in what happens in large populations when you are trying to monitor them and when they have access to nicotine replacement over a long period of time.

Frank J Vocci is the deputy director of the Medication Development Division of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He was also at Food and Drug Administration when nicotine polacrilex, or gum, was approved, and he now sees these issues both through the perspectives of other drugs and from the perspective of nicotine.