Smoking and public health: Good news, bad news
Via the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog comes a mixed bag of news about tobacco. According to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (behind pay firewall; Harvard news release here), sales of cigarettes are down from 21.1 billion packs in 2000 to 17.4 billion in 2007.
However, sales of snuff, roll-your-own tobacco and small cigares are up by the equivalent of 1.1 billion packs of cigarettes, based on tobacco and nicotine content. So the public health benefits of reduced cigarette smoking are being somewhat diluted.
"The major factor in the apparent switch to non-cigarette products by smokers appears to be price -- with the federal tax on other forms of tobacco 1/10th that of cigarettes -- and the heavy attention given to campaigning against cigarette use but not against other forms of tobacco products in recent years," the news release states. It also points out that raising the price of tobacco has been the most effective way of reducing tobacco use in the U.S.
So don't be surprised if public-health advocates mount an effort to get the feds and states to raise their taxes on non-cigarette forms of tobacco.
Comments (3)
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Tobacco users are nothing more than foul smelling druggies with bad breath who lack common sense, will power, and personal discipline - there is little difference between tobacco farmers and Latin American growers of the plant (coca) from which cocain is derived - both cater to human weaknesses and make significant contributions to ill health and early deaths. Cigarette sellers and marketers are actually nothing more than drug pushers - every time I see someone using one of those personal portable oxygen tanks with the little plastic tubes running up their nose I approach them ever so quietly and politely and ask them if they have a cigarette I can bum.
Posted on June 11, 2008 10:52 AM
Holden, assuming you're not just being ironic, your compassion is touching. Most smokers start when they're very young, a time when, yes, common sense often is lacking. (I'm about to post something on a new Web site that mentions studies that suggests that the parts of the brain that affect judgment may not mature until a person is 25.) But nicotine is as addictive as cocaine, and the more we learn about the physiological nature of substance addiction (particularly its effects on the brain), the less room there is to dismiss addiction as simply lack of willpower.
As for folks on portable oxygen, how do you know they all smoke? (Also, this sounds familiar -- haven't you posted something like this before?)
Posted on June 11, 2008 11:01 AM
they are just people that have no where to turn and found themselfs in a big hole that they think they cant get out of so they just dig themself deeper but trying smoking and other things. But most of they don't know that they stink and don't know that they have a problem
Posted on March 6, 2009 3:00 PM