Editor's note: We just received this letter, a reminder that weighing long-term risks and benefits is often hardest for the young, which is what makes them such an important market for cigarette manufacturers. To help kids get a better handle on the risks, we'll soon publish a teen version of our book Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You, and for smokers of all ages interested in knowing some of the quit-assist options, there's our book Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century. We'd also recommend that the letter writer talk to her parents about her problem, despite her stated reluctance to do so, and that other kids in the same situation talk to their parents and doctors as well. TS
Harm Reduction
During scenes from the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists, Dana and David Hurst are seen undergoing an unholy combination of adultery and viral gastroenteritis. While Dana (Hope Davis) and their three kids are all feverish and vomiting, David (Campbell Scott) responds to the illness and betrayal in his family by . . . pulling out a pack of smokes.
Editor's note: People sometimes think of smoking as little more dangerous than countless other bad habits, so the idea of quitting through nicotine replacement therapy or pharmaceuticals that combat nicotine cravings may strike some as counterintuitive as though it were a mere switching from one substance to another. But smoking kills about a third of users and has many other negative health effects (see ACSH's book about Cigarettes), while drugs to aid smoking cessation just might save your life. The most common such drugs are described in this excerpt from ACSH's book Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century: What Modern Science Has Learned About Smoking Cessation. TS
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"No Smoking," the ubiquitous sign in public buildings, should also be present in another building your home. According to the August issue of the British Medical Journal, University of Warwick researchers recommend banning all smoking in parents' homes in order to decrease the potential harm of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) to babies.
Smokers shorten their lives by an average of seven years, according to insurance actuarial tables (one of humanity's greatest inventions and a model for rational calculation that the rest of the culture would do well to imitate). At least, seven years is what studies suggest is the handicap insurance companies are putting on smoking. Insurance companies normally don't officially open their actuarial tables to outside inspection, since those numbers are the basis of all the gambling-like choices the companies make about who to charge how much, the odds of having to pay out, and so forth.
Executive Summary
Cigarette smoking is a very widespread and serious health problem. More than 46 million American adults smoke, and smoking contributes to more than 430,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Nearly 70% of smokers want to quit, and nearly 41% say that they have attempted to quit at least once in the past year.
A new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century: What Modern Science Has Learned About Smoking Cessation, summarizes the spectrum of methods that have been proven to help smokers quit. The report also describes smoking cessation techniques currently in development and evaluates alternative methods that have been advocated as aids to smoking cessation. This report is not intended as a stop-smoking guide; instead, it is best used as a source of background information to complement the stop-smoking advice available from local and national health organizations, government agencies, and physicians.
If you vaguely recall hearing that smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco, etc.) is about as dangerous as cigarettes, you're hardly alone but it isn't true.
Smokeless tobacco is only about one sixtieth as likely to kill mainly through oral cancers as cigarettes. Cigarettes cause the premature death of about one third of their users and have a host of other ill effects. See ACSH's newly-revised book, Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You for more on the risks.
According to a recent UCLA study, "Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Tobacco-Related Mortality in a Prospective Study of Californians" (reported in the British Medical Journal), environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is not as harmful as many anti-smoking activists say. The study, which tracked 118,058 individuals over the course of thirty-eight years, found no significant correlation between exposure to secondhand smoke and death due to coronary heart disease or lung cancer. There was a correlation between secondhand smoke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was more likely to kill spouses of smokers.
The First Comprehensive Guide to the Health Consequences of Smoking
We're fond of the year-old New York Sun newspaper and are no fans of intrusive regulations, but when the Sun chose to chronicle how New Yorkers are coping with Mayor Bloomberg's ban on smoking in bars, it was a reminder how little perspective people have on relative risks.
"Smokers Learn Really Bad Habits in Cigarette-Free City Night Spots" was the headline last week, with the subtitle "Some Bite Their Nails; Others Just Drink More." As if those "really" bad habits weren't shocking enough, the lead paragraph told of a man who has taken up picking his cuticles. "Once inlets of sweet if slurry tranquility," rhapsodizes the article, "the city's bars have become dens of scratching, twitching, and fiddling...a collection of ugly anxieties."
The front cover of a recent Time magazine announces a big story on women and heart disease inside. What are the main causes? How does the risk compare to that from other diseases facing women, such as breast cancer? What can be done to prevent heart disease?
It's great to see Time tackling the under-reported issue of heart disease in women but another way they could help fight heart disease is by being more careful about what they put on the back cover. No one is forcing them to advertise cigarettes, the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. and a leading cause of heart disease (see ACSH's booklet Irreversible Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking for a reminder that smoking damages more than lungs).