The goal of No Butts: New Opportunities is to reduce the risk of smoking-related cancer for consumers of substance abuse treatment at Mental Health Mental Retardation of Tarrant County’s Addiction Services Division (MHMRTC-AdS), many of whom are uninsured. No Butts will decrease the tobacco dependence of AdS consumers by increasing AdS clinicians’ perceived importance of smoking cessation treatment and the number of AdS consumers’ smoking quit attempts.

To accomplish this, No Butts will (1) provide AdS consumers who smoke with smoking cessation treatment along with their existing drug treatment and (2) provide a separate group for smoking cessation. Using the requested funds, all AdS cli...

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The goal of No Butts: New Opportunities is to reduce the risk of smoking-related cancer for consumers of substance abuse treatment at Mental Health Mental Retardation of Tarrant County’s Addiction Services Division (MHMRTC-AdS), many of whom are uninsured. No Butts will decrease the tobacco dependence of AdS consumers by increasing AdS clinicians’ perceived importance of smoking cessation treatment and the number of AdS consumers’ smoking quit attempts.

To accomplish this, No Butts will (1) provide AdS consumers who smoke with smoking cessation treatment along with their existing drug treatment and (2) provide a separate group for smoking cessation. Using the requested funds, all AdS clinicians will receive training in treating tobacco dependence. AdS clinics will make infrastructure changes to prompt clinicians to provide smoking cessation treatment and to make quitting easier for AdS consumers.

After the training and infrastructure changes, AdS clinicians will begin asking all consumers if they smoke and will encourage consumers to quit. AdS clinicians will help consumers prepare for, and will provide support through, a quit attempt, including providing Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) to ease withdrawal symptoms. Consumers who attempt to quit can join the smoking cessation group to gain extra support.

All clinics will hold weekly celebrations to recognize consumers’ quitting successes. Further, consumers will continue to receive smoking cessation treatment as they move to less intensive services (e.g. from inpatient treatment to outpatient treatment). Over the one-year project period, AdS will encourage 3,200 individuals to quit, assist 1,600 individuals in quitting, decrease the level of 1,600 consumers’ addiction to tobacco, and provide 800 consumers with a specialized group for sustained smoking cessation support.

In the future, AdS plans to work with the Tobacco-Free North Texas Coalition to educate the community about the importance of smoking cessation and expand these services to other local substance abuse treatment providers and to the larger community. These services are especially important for people who are addicted to other drugs because research suggests that they are medically underserved, more addicted to tobacco and are more likely to die from smoking-related diseases than the general population.

Further, AdS consumers are usually uninsured and would not normally be able to afford Nicotine Replacement Therapy or smoking cessation treatment, greatly decreasing their chances of being able to quit. Without this treatment, many AdS consumers will develop smoking-related diseases which, because they are usually uninsured, would result in high costs to the public healthcare system. Conversely, through providing this treatment, No Butts will increase the health of AdS consumers and decrease the public healthcare costs of treating smoking-related illnesses.

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