My mother smoked while she was pregnant with my sister and me. I used to light her cigarettes while she was driving. One time I handed her a lit Benson & Hedges backwards, burning her lip and nearly causing a huge freeway accident. Swerving wildly, she managed to avoid the car in front of her — and quickly grabbed for the cigarette, which had flown out of her hand. Puffing rapidly, she got the cherry back up to a glow, and a look of calm passed over her face as she blew out her first inhale.
Harm Reduction
While today marks the 33rd annual Great American Smokeout, put away your firewood because this isn’t a call for a national bonfire, as the name might mistakenly imply, but is instead an event sponsored by the American Cancer Society that encourages smokers to drop the habit for 24 hours. By urging smokers to not puff on a cigarette for a whole day, the ACS hopes that this may be just the right kind of motivation to get them to quit permanently. The yearly event first began in 1977, and the percentage of adult smokers in the U.S. dropped from 34 to 21 percent from 1978 to 2005. That rate, however, has not budged since, and 46.6 million U.S.
Tobacco companies such as Philip Morris International (PMI), spun off from Altria Group Inc. in 2008 to expand the company s foreign market share and evade American regulation and litigation, have assumed the role of big, bad bully on the foreign block. The companies and others like it are using expensive lobbying campaigns and lawsuits to prevent ad restrictions, larger health warnings and higher cigarette taxes from being enacted in countries like Brazil, the Philippines and Mexico.
ACSH friend Bill Godshall of Smokefree Pennsylvania supplies some needed background to yesterday’s Dispatchitem about graphic labels on cigarette packs. Commenting on the Department of Health and Human Services’ proposal to mandate scary images on cigarette packs, Dr. Whelan said in yesterday’s Dispatch that “to my knowledge there is no evidence that these images deter addicted smokers.”
But Godshall says:
Most of us may already know that smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing an average of 440,000 people annually. But not all of us know that women who smoke or used to smoke regularly are at a greater risk of dying from breast cancer. Those statistics come from a large prospective cohort study conducted by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and presented at the Ninth Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.
Halloween may already be over, but the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) hasn’t given up on scaring smokers quite yet. Describing it as “the most significant change in more than 25 years,” the HHS revealed yesterday new, larger, more graphic warning labels that will be required on cigarette packages and ads. The pictures will include images of a dead body in a morgue, a man having a heart attack, and a lung bisected with a surgical scar.
Upon unveiling the new warning labels, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, "Today marks an important milestone in protecting our children and the health of the American public.”
Even though smoking rates have remained stagnant since 2007 in U.S. adults, many states are cutting funding for smoking cessation programs, The Wall Street Journal reports. In an effort to balance looming budget deficits, Washington state, for example, is reducing funding for its tobacco control program to just $1.4 million in 2012 from the $27 million allocated in 2007. ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross is disappointed, but not surprised, that states have cut funding “despite the fact that they’re still raking in revenue in the form of settlement money from tobacco companies.
How mainstream are e-cigarettes these days? Last week this writer found a starter kit advertised for $19.99 at the cash register of his local 7-Eleven in Manhattan’s TriBeCa district. Well, if they’re good enough for Katherine Heigl...
The NJOY mini-kit came with an e-cigarette, USB charger and two nicotine cartridges. After letting it charge, ACSH staffers were vaping during ourDispatch meeting this morning. (Yes, really).
This week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication by the CDC, found that the proportion of cigarette smokers who also use smokeless tobacco products — such as snuff and chew tobacco — ranged from 0.9 to 13.7 percent on a state-by-state analysis, according to data from the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
Electronic cigarettes are a “rapidly growing Internet phenomenon” that may pose unknown risks, two doctors and a researcher from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital write in an opinion piece for the Annals of Internal Medicine. E-cigarettes “may pose a risk as starter products for nonusers of tobacco,” could release dangerous toxins, and are unproven as smoking-cessation aids, write the authors, led by David W. Bates, M.D., MSc.
Electronic cigarette manufacturer Smoking Everywhere has agreed to numerous advertising restrictions in a settlement with the state of California, state Attorney General Jerry Brown announced Friday. Under the settlement, Smoking Everywhere is not allowed to market their products to minors and cannot make claims that e-cigarettes are a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes until they receive FDA approval as smoking cessation devices. The company is also prohibited from selling their products in public vending machines accessible to minors and cannot run advertisements featuring people who appear to be under the age of 28.
Someone once said that there’s a little good and evil in us all. As much as ACSH condemns the NYC Health Department for overreaching in its anti-soda campaign, we must give it credit for an anti-smoking campaign that has reduced smoking deaths by 17 percent in the past eight years. The number of deaths fell from 8,700 in 2002 to 7,200 in 2009, and the number of smokers has fallen by a third, the health department reported yesterday.