Smokers offered financial rewards to kick the habit

Lower earners smoke more than higher earners and could be particularly receptive to financial incentives to give up, according to researchers in Switzerland. But is the promise of money enough to make them quit for good? Financial incentives work just as well as medication or aids such as nicotine patches, concluded a team of scientists led by Jean-François Etter, professor of public health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva. Combined, the various methods could be even more effective. The research, published on Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, involved 800 smokers from the Geneva region who all earned less than CHF50,000 ($51,300) a year. These were then divided into two groups. Both were trying to give up smoking but one group was offered supermarket vouchers of increasing value the longer they didn’t touch a cigarette, starting with CHF100 ($103) for one week and CHF1,500 for whoever managed to go without for six months.