Thank you for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service with me Ashley Bern.

Today I'm taking you back to the early 1980s and the creation of the first nicotine patches.

If you're a smoker they want to stick one on you. They put one underneath Riteson, a heavy

smoker for 20 years and she never looked back.

The patches work for me I had to make a decision once a day to put it on. Obviously you're getting

some nicotine. So in fact the craving for the drug is not nearly as potent as it would

be had you just gone so cold turkey. And that was my craving, that was my drug dependency

if you like taking care of.

Another satisfied customer for the nicotine patch.

At the time there was something of a revelation and the only alternative back then was nicotine

chewing gum. The idea for the nicotine patches had emerged during a casual family chat between

Dr. Daniel Rose, a physician in Northern California and this man, his brother Professor

Jed Rose.

We had a conversation about the work I was doing on nicotine at tobacco research and trying

to develop improved treatments to help smokers quit and he was familiar with the then very

new transdermal skin patches that were being developed to treat motion sickness or angina

heart pain. And he suggested that perhaps nicotine patch might be worth looking into.

Well that suddenly clicked in my brain like a lightning bolt because I knew that nicotine

does get through the skin very easily. In fact sometimes tobacco harvesters would get physically

sick because of getting an overdose of nicotine absorbed through the skin.

So the idea all sprung from a casual chat between brothers but then Jed had to try and see

if it would work.

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