Evaluating the financial implications of alternative strategies for dealing with nicotine addiction is a more challenging assignment than one might initially infer. The difficulty lies not so much in projecting the financial implications of a specific strategy, but rather in trying to narrow the field of candidate strategies to a manageable and likely subset of a myriad of diverse possibilities. In contemplating my assignment, I concluded that it would be less useful, at this stage, to offer specific financial “guesstimates” on individual strategies than to provide a context for later financial analysis, reflecting the nature of the as-now elusive future.

As such, with one exception, I shall not present dollar estimates of financial implications. Rather, I shall examine the future context of dealing with nicotine addiction, beginning with goals and then focusing on means of achieving these goals. As will be obvious throughout this discussion, different goals, approached by different means, will have very different sets of financial implications, for very different organisations and individuals. I shall identify these diverse groups and contemplate a dimension of “financial implications” that may not have occurred to the typical reader, whether these implications are socially desirable or not. Finally, I shall turn to the one arena in which financial implications can be considered somewhat less abstractly: the cost-effectiveness of contemporary smoking cessation treatments and policies.