PFor years, researchers have been searching for the solution: Band-Aids, gum, and a lot of “you must really want it” psychology. Now there is a way to quit smoking cytisine. Available from March 2026, it is officially the first drug against smoking addiction reimbursed by the National Health Service.
Cytisine: what it is and how the smoking cessation drug works
Laburnum is a beautiful and somewhat toxic plantwith clusters of yellow wisteria-like flowers. It belongs to the Leguminosae family, grows spontaneously in many areas of Europe and for centuries has had no role other than ornamental. Then pharmacological research isolated the molecule it produces inside, cytisineand discovered that this substance does a very specific thing: it attaches to the same brain receptors that nicotine acts on.
Cytisine clears withdrawal symptoms
It doesn’t activate them in the same way, though. It occupies them without fully satisfying thema bit like showing up to a date in someone else’s place. In this way, the smoker’s brain stops receiving the signal it was looking for and, in the meantime, withdrawal symptoms, irritability, anxiety, insomnia, that dull feeling of malaise, they fade because the receptors are not completely dry.
It’s a gentle deception and it works. In essence, what happens: the smoker’s brain does not look for the cigarette, look for the dopamine that the cigarette promises. Cytisine breaks that promise, little by little.
For those who have tried to quit in every possible way, a natural molecule finally arrives that “tricks” the brain and turns off abstinence. (Getty Images)
How it works: 25 days, not a lifetime
The treatment lasts 25 days. Not months, not years. And it has an internal logic that is worth understanding: you don’t start by quitting. You start by smoking again, while the tablets start to work. By the fifth day, as the pleasure of the cigarette fades because the receptors are already occupied by the drug. Then the dose gradually decreases for the duration of the cycle.
This scaling method is not an intuition: it is the result of numerous clinical studies, and it is what the WHO included in its guidelines in 2024, recognizing cytisine as an effective therapy for tobacco use disorder, which is the medical term for what in common Italian is called smoking addiction.
Who can use cytisine and how to get it prescribed
One of the things that makes this news concretely important, it especially concerns those who smoke more and for longer: often, in fact, these are elderly people with chronic pathologies who already take many medications. For them, adding a new drug has always been a risk to be carefully evaluateddue to possible interactions with what they already take. Cytisine, on this front, has a reassuring profile: it has no known significant pharmacological interactions. Side effects exist, as with any medicine, but they are generally mild and temporary.
Therefore it is a drug that can also be used by the most fragile people, precisely those for whom quitting smoking would make the most difference. Your family doctor can prescribe itbut also pulmonologists, oncologists, cardiologists and Sert specialists.
The bill that no one wants to do
The people who die every year from smoking-related causes are exactly 93 thousand: these are lung tumors, heart attacks, strokes, respiratory diseases that develop silently for decades and then literally take your breath away. Yet until today, in Italy, there was no smoking cessation drug that the National Health System reimbursed.
Anyone who wanted pharmacological support had to pay for it. Those who couldn’t afford it, or didn’t know it existed, were left alone with their own will. Cytisine, pproduced by the Adamed company under the trade name RECIGARis not a discovery of this month. AND entered the WHO list of essential molecules in 2025. In other European countries it was already used. In Italy it existed only as a galenic preparation, i.e. made by hand in a pharmacy on the doctor’s recommendation, not standardized, not reimbursed and little known. Now it changes shape, changes status and changes accessibility.
