Elizabeth hurley sucks to stop smoking

Abstract

During a recent photography shoot for a cosmetics advertisement on the Caribbean island of St Bartholomew, actress and model Elizabeth Hurley was caught by paparazzi sun-bathing topless while sucking on a baby's pink pacifier [see http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7257/319/b]. British tabloid newspapers struggled to account for the actress's bizarre accessory. The Mirror explained that “there are few better ways to protect luscious lips from cracking or burning in harsh summer sun.” Another tabloid surmised that Ms Hurley was not touched enough as a child and was continually regressing into an infantile state. Finally, it came out that the pacifier was Ms Hurley's latest method to give up the half a pack of Marlboro Lights she smokes each day. A spokeswoman for Ms Hurley explained that nicotine patches did not seem to work for her. The idea for the pacifier, she said, came from Desmond Morris's book Manwatching, which “equated smoking with a baby's desire to be breast-fed.” Mr Morris was pleased to hear that Ms Hurley had taken his advice: “Only someone like Liz, whom I've never met, could make something like a dummy [pacifier] look chic and trendy. As far as I know, she's the only person to have taken up my idea to suck on a dummy to fight the urge to light up.” Actor Hugh Grant, Ms Hurley's former boyfriend, confirmed that she was an addicted smoker. “Elizabeth smokes 4,000 cigarettes a day. I've caught her with cigarettes in her nostrils,” he told Esquire magazine last September. Confirming her addiction to cigarettes, a web site devoted to female smoking celebrities lists 50 instances when the supermodel's smoking—or attempts to stop—have been shown or mentioned in newspapers, magazines, or movies (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~lsh/asfs/H/Hurley.html). If the idea of sucking a pacifier to give up catches on, a randomized trial to measure its effectiveness may follow. Investigators may have difficulty, though, devising an appropriate placebo for the control condition.