Have you ever watched a loved one die from tobacco use? Since 443,000 Americans and 37,000 Canadians die each year as a direct result of tobacco use, a good percentage of us have had that experience. About 36 per cent of these deaths were from cancer. These figures do not include deaths from second-hand smoke. All of these deaths were avoidable and most of them entailed long, protracted periods of suffering for the individual and their families. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, tobacco can make life "poor, nasty, brutish and short."
Since Joseph Stalin said that one death is a tragedy and 1,000,000 deaths a statistic, let's reframe these 480,000 annual passings. As this equals about 1,315 people per day, at this rate the figures below show how long would it take to go through certain populations.
•Average number of facebook friends -- 2.4 hours
•Author's home town -- 6.0 hours
•Coalition deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan -- 6.1 days
•US deaths in Vietnam war -- 44 days
•Average annual US/Canadian deaths in WWII -- 88 days
•State of Wyoming -- 1 yr. 73 days
According to the Henningfield and Benowitz ratings, it is harder to quit nicotine than heroin, cocaine or alcohol. Today, armed with the knowledge of these strong addictive properties and the facts of how harmful tobacco is, it does take a special kind of stupidity to start smoking.
I'm a member of that club, having started smoking in the late 1960s and quitting in 1992. When I started, there was less information out there about the harmful effects of tobacco. That is no excuse, however, as your body tells you in spades just how awful tobacco is when you first light up.
Forcing yourself to go past those initial physical rejections with the false conviction that you won't be harmed by tobacco is indeed the arrogance of youth. If we'd all listened to our bodies during the first cigarette, I doubt anyone would continue smoking.
The CDC estimates that 3,800 high school students per day in the United States smoke their first cigarette and one in five high school students are smokers.
The academy award of special kind of stupidity, however, goes to the federal, provincial and state governments. Yes smoking rates have dropped from 49 per cent of the Canadian population 15 years and older in 1965 to about 17 per cent in 2010, a decline rate which has decreased in recent years.
Rates in the United States are slightly higher but show similar declines. There are several reasons for these changes, including; higher taxes on tobacco, better education, legislation restricting smoking in public places, advertising bans, and packaging warnings. Governments will take full credit for the decline, but perhaps the most important reason is that smoking has become much less socially acceptable. It just isn't cool to smoke anymore. Many of the changes such as restricting smoking in public places were spearheaded by anti-smoking groups, not governments.
One of the main reasons more measures have not been taken is governments' addiction to tobacco taxes. At times, they show their true colours and flash this addiction for all to see. A prime example is the reduction in taxes in Canada during the early 1990s due to smuggling. These reductions ranged from 50 cents per package in the western provinces and Newfoundland to a whopping $1.92 in Ontario and $2.10 in Quebec. It was many years before prices came back to pre-1994 levels. This was done more to recoup lost taxes than counteract smuggling. Governments had been preaching for years that increases on tobacco taxes were only to reduce consumption. Statistics show that consumption did increase after taxes fell.
According to the CDC, tobacco use costs $97 billion in lost productivity and $96 billion in health care per year in the U.S. That works out to about $619 for every American. The emotional and mental health costs of the suffering and loss of life can never be measured. The strain of seeing a loved one slowly dying from the effects of tobacco use can scar one forever.
When you look at the numbers alone, it boggles the mind why there have not been more measures taken to curb or eliminate smoking altogether. Measures such as raising the cost of cigarettes into the stratosphere, say $50 a pack, tax breaks for quitters, more financial assistance for cessation aids such as the nicotine patch and drugs, and more restrictive legislation around where one can smoke. Maybe in the near future we can have people at the government helms who will become addicted to saving their citizen's lives, rather than inhaling more taxes
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Will these graphics change teenagers' minds about smoking -- or yours, for that matter? Here are 10 parts of our bodies that suffer when we smoke:
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Research shows that those who are very light smokers 2 or 3 a day have no greater mortality or lung cancer than non smokers. It is complete junk science.
If you want a detailed answer on why non smokers do not contract lung cancer from SHS, here it is.
It is believed by the WHO and its offshoot the International Agency For Research on Cancer that lung cancer in smokers is caused by genetic mutation of the p53 gene. The p53 stops cancer cells multiplying. The inhalation of cigarette smoke ingests benzo(a)pyrene a 5 ring benzene molecule that causes the genetic mutation called a guanine to thymine transversion, making the p53 ineffective.
The problem is that vehicles give out benzo(a)pyrene by a factor of 10, please see the paper below. Yep you are 10 times more likely to contract lung cancer from Phil Froats car than any cigarette,
"http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17495701
"Research shows that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided,”
In 1986, the American Cancer Society reported that: “Over 90% of the estimated 37 million people who have stopped smoking in this country since the Surgeon General’s first report linking smoking to cancer have done so unaided.
“Research shows that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided,” and that “53% of the ex-smokers said that it was “not at all difficult” to stop, 27% said it was “fairly difficult”, and the remainder found it very difficult.”
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000216
per year—or any number remotely close to 400,000—are
caused by tobacco. Nor has that estimate been adjusted for the
positive effects of smoking—less obesity, colitis, depression,
Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and, for some women,
a lower incidence of breast cancer. The actual damage from
smoking is neither known nor knowable with precision.
Responsible statisticians agree that it is impossible to attribute
causation to a single variable, like tobacco, when there are multiple
causal factors that are correlated with one another. The
damage from cigarettes is far less than it is made out to be.
Most important, the government should stop lying and stop
pretending that smoking-related deaths are anything but a statistical
artifact. The unifying bond of all science is that truth is
its aim. When that goal yields to politics, tainting science in
order to advance predetermined ends, we are all at risk. Sadly,
that is exactly what has transpired as our public officials fabricate
evidence to promote their crusade against 'big' tobacco.
The 400,000-deaths figure is not a body count, but a COMPUTER-GENERATED estimate based on assumptions that are heavily biased by a political agenda of lies and loot. The people perpetrating this fraud, and their promoters, should be arrested, charged, and locked up for a very long time.
And the more I see of the anti-smoking campaigns, the more I'm convinced they aren't about health, they're about turning people into good little obese cocooners.
Guess we will never know since such studies are taboo in our society. A British study was published almost a decade ago that did just that, it linked a very large percentage of those reported smoking related deaths to vehicle emissions. Sadly that study disappeared the same day it was reported.