Tabex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytisine) is what helped me (and my boyfriend) quit smoking after many years (~30) of smoking and several failed attempts to quit using nicotine gum and patches. We have now been smoke-free for over 5 months, which is still not long, but much longer than we have ever lasted before.

It seems strange to me that with all the talk about the importance of quitting smoking that Tabex is not well known. A course of treatment lasts 25 days, costed me €35 for the whole course, you can buy it online, you stop smoking on the 5th day, and it makes quitting a lot easier. Really.

It does still require motivation in certain situations when you used to smoke before (going out drinking, clubbing, etc.) but it's still much easier than with anything else we tried, and after the first couple of weeks your brain rewires itself. Five months in, going out with friends who still smoke, we were both not tempted to take a cigarette from them. This is huge for us.

If you really want to quit smoking and everything else failed so far, give it a try.

If you do buy online, just make sure it's not a counterfeit. I don't have any advice regarding that, we got ours at a pharmacy on a trip to Poland.

The cravings do go away entirely eventually. It took me probably 2-3 years after I quit before the random cravings stopped, I used to want make the smoking motion with my hand and that finally went away as well. It’s a fairly linear drop off I think, you just get them with less and less frequency as time goes on.

It's an old drug so can't be patented, so nobody will pay for studies on it, which means no health service will approve it.

This so much. I am still confused how well tabex works and how few people know about it.

Combine with a dopamine booster for the first weeks (or masturbate a lot) and quitting suddenly feels easy.

I bought it online but directly from a Polish or Slovakian pharmacy.

Thanks for sharing. I know lots of people who can benefit from this.

Edit: where do people get treatment? My searches aren't giving me anything useful to give to friends trying to quit

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