Boosting the Brain’s Braking System Helps People Smoke Less

The obvious target, if you want to help someone stop smoking, seems like it would be the craving itself. Kill the desire, kill the habit. It’s the kind of logic that has driven decades of pharmacology aimed at the brain’s reward circuitry, with results that have been, at best, modest. Fewer than one in ten smokers achieves long-term abstinence even with the best available medications. Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina took a different view. What if, instead of attacking...