In our study we did not find any evidence to suggest that treatment efficacy differed according to race (i.e., no treatment-by-race interaction). However, minority smokers may be less accepting of nicotine replacement products than white smokers (Fu et al. 2005). Latino smokers have been observed to use pharmaceutical aids less often than white smokers (Levinson et al. 2004). Because drug accountability was not collected in our study, we cannot assess for this. However, we did demonstrate that the two treatments were predictive of smoking abstinence in minority smokers. This is similar to another report where bupropion with active nicotine gum or bupropion with placebo nicotine gum was more effective among minority smokers than placebo bupropion and placebo nicotine gum (Piper et al. 2007). Furthermore, bupropion has been shown to help African-American smokers to stop smoking at higher rates compared to placebo (Ahluwalia et al. 2002; Robles et al. 2008).
