Tobacco is classified as a favorite food with coffee, chocolate, and confectionery. Smoking is classified as ‘Tobacco Dependence’ according to International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and ‘Tobacco Use Disorder’ according to DSM-V criteria of the American Psychiatric Association. Thus, smoking cessation is a public health issue that requires social attention beyond reducing the preference of favorite food by individual efforts. The Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Health Insurance Corporation have started project in order to help people who wish to stop smoking. This project covers the specified portion of prescription smoking cessation drugs or nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products. However, the medical staffs of this project include doctors, dentists, oriental medical doctors, nurses except community pharmacists who have low thresholds and high accessibility. In this article, we compare the cases of smoking cessation services in Korea and foreign countries, and propose pharmacist smoking cessation service model in Korea.

Keywords: Smoking cessation, Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), Community pharmacy