Harm Reduction

Many more individuals with diagnosable mental disorders are smokers as compared to the rest of the population. It turns out that mentally ill adults in the United States smoke cigarettes at a rate 70 percent higher than adults without mental illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC analyzed data from the 2009-2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which interviewed 138,000 adults in their home. (It didn t include patients in mental hospitals). One in five of those surveyed were found to have some form of mental illness, and 36 percent of those people were smokers, compared to 21 percent of other adults.
Taking bupropion (Zyban), a drug used to help people stop smoking by reducing cravings and other withdrawal effects, did not help smokers quit in the period after a heart attack, a new study finds. While the drug has been shown to be slightly effective in healthy smokers and in individuals with stable cardiovascular disease, this is not true right after a heart attack.
It s a grim, unwelcome milestone for gender equality. Two new studies survey the toll cigarette smoking takes on American lives and it turns out tobacco-related deaths have become as common for women as for men.
Our New York readers should be able to catch ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross discussing fracking on WCBS-TV (channel 2) tonight between 5 and 6, and possibly between 6 and 6:30, and maybe even between 11 and 11:30. Also, if you haven t already, please like our Facebook page, Facts about Fracking.
The U.S. is backsliding when it comes to tobacco control, the American Lung Association says. The group has just issued its annual report card on how well the federal government, states and cities are doing on cessation efforts, giving many Ds and Fs. The report card grades the various authorities on how well they are doing in preventing tobacco use, helping smokers quit and protecting the public from secondhand smoke.
"The EU s new tobacco policy statement, ostensibly designed to promote public health, will have the opposite effect: Far from reducing the toll of tobacco, millions will be condemned to ongoing addiction to smoking, half of whom will die as a direct result. The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one billion lives cut short worldwide.
The European Union Health Commission is out with a new set of rules proposing more regulations on e-cigarettes and tightening the absurd ban on snus which ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross is doing his best to counter in the popular press. Dr. Ross has had no less than three columns in various publications about the new directives. In Forbes, he wrote that the the new policy guidelines "barely tinker with lethal, addictive cigarettes while effectively banning products that have been shown to help smokers quit."
The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one-billion lives cut short worldwide. By tobacco, however, anyone with knowledge of the spectrum of tobacco-related disease knows it s the inhalation of cigarette smoke hundreds of thousands of times over decades that would be responsible if that catastrophic prediction comes to pass the relative harm of non-combustible tobacco and nicotine-delivery products is in the order of one percent that of smoking. Yet the new policy guidelines barely tinker with lethal, addictive cigarettes while effectively banning products that have been shown to help smokers quit.
H.I.V. positive patients who smoke lose more years to smoking than to the virus itself, a new Danish study suggests. Researchers from Copenhagen University tracked nearly 3,000 Danish H.I.V. patients from 1995 to 2010, comparing them with a pool of 10,642 Danes of the same age and sex. They found that health complications resulting from smoking and not from H.I.V. itself are actually the biggest cause of death among HIV-positive individuals. Smoking was more closely linked to early death than was obesity, excess drinking or baseline HIV viral load a measure of how sick a patient was at diagnosis.
Yesterday, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross presented ACSH s position on access to reduced-risk tobacco and nicotine products at the FDA s public meeting on nicotine replacement therapies and smoking-cessation products. In his synopsis of the current sad state of affairs, Dr. Ross after discussing the counterproductive FDA approach to communicating risks called to account the public health authorities who have misled and continue to mislead smokers about the risks of various tobacco products. He states,
A new analysis of the Nurse s Health Study has quantified just how much smoking contributes to sudden cardiac death and how quitting can potentially reduce or eliminate that risk. Cigarette smoking is a known risk factor for sudden cardiac death, but until now, we didn t know how the quantity and duration of smoking affected the risk among apparently healthy women, nor did we have long-term follow-up, said Roopinder K. Sandhu, M.D., M.P.H., the study s lead author and a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Although the legal age for purchasing tobacco products is 18, everyday more than 3,800 pre-teens and adolescents ages 12 to 17 smoke their first cigarette, among whom 1,000 go on to become addicted smokers. In response to these disturbing figures, researchers explored the effect of behavior-based interventions on preventing smoking initiation among young people who have not become regular smokers, as well as behavior-based interventions aimed at promoting cessation.