One billion people will die of tobacco-related diseases this century unless governments in rich and poor countries alike get serious about preventing smoking, top World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Monday.
This is discouraging news and not just because of the tragedy of watching people voluntarily expose themselves to a premature death (slowly and painfully in many cases) by smoking cigarettes. Contrary to the demagogic wailing about overpopulation heard over the decades, many countries are not producing enough citizens to maintain their economies. Removing a billion or so folks from census can't be helpful to countries such as New Zealand ("Birth Rates Headed For Serious Decline") or Russia, which is predicted to see its population fall between 560,000 to 840,000 persons per year over the next two decades, or any of thirteen other countries identified as having declining populations. Who would have ever thought that we could get over 8 million people a year to kill themselves?
We all know that smoking is looked on as a cool and glamorous way to give your parents, teachers and other authority figures the finger, until the actual addiction sets in at which time it becomes more of a necessity and less of a way to glorify the Hollywood lifestyle. Smoking is also physically addicting, even at seemingly innocuous teeny-bopper doses such as 3 to 4 cigarettes a day.
Solutions to this plague are difficult to employ, but one expert thinks that some countries are on the right track:
However, if governments introduced measures such as aggressive taxation, banning cigarette advertising and making offices and public places totally tobacco-free, smoking rates could halve by 2050, he [Douglas Bettcher, head of the WHO's Tobacco Free Initiative] said. "It's a completely preventable epidemic," Bettcher said, citing countries such as Singapore, Australia and Thailand where tough anti-smoking laws have helped people to quit.
"If we do that, by 2050 we can save 200 million lives."
Other than the association between nicotinic treatments and improvement in certain neuropsychiatric disorders and age-related cognitive decline, there are no health benefits to smoking, and don't tell me that nicotine and nicotinic agonists can only be delivered by puffing on Marlboros. If scientists ever prove that nicotine can benefit patients with Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's, they won't be recommending smoking as the cure.
It seems logical that governments of countries destined for extinction due to their inability to maintain a sustaining population would be interested in preserving as many citizens as possible. Getting rid of cigarette smoking just might be a strategy worth pursuing. After all, smokers can always take up another bad habit to replace the forlorn one.
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Thanks for this. I lost my boyfriend to lung cancer 2 years ago, and it AMAZES me to see people put themselves in a position to get this awful disease when they could almost completely avoid it simply by not smoking.
Contrary to the demagogic wailing about overpopulation heard over the decades, many countries are not producing enough citizens to maintain their economies.
Umm, the wailing about overpopulation is due to fears of ecological overshoot. The fact that a declining population raises a number of economic difficulties is neither here nor there. One does not disprove the other.
That's what you get for basing your economics on exponential growth when you live in a finite ecosystem.
The highlighting of smoking as a completely preventable disease is interesting in view that the ban on smoking in public places finally applied to the whole of the UK on the 1st July (England was the holdout). This article appeared in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/smoking/Story/0,,2115280,00.html which looked at Hull, which has the highest percentage of smokers in the UK.
Read the article, if only for the quotes. Two stand out in particular - 'I smoke 100 to 120 cigs a day. The ban will kill us' & 'One mother who works behind the bar in another Bransholme pub and is four months pregnant says proudly between puffs on a roll-up that "the other three are fine".'
It would be funny, if only it wasn't so tragic.
Interesting figures about smoking versus overshoot effects :
A soon-to-be-published world bank report will state that each year, 500 000 Chinese people die from pollution. While 600 000 die from lung cancer.
Pollution is caused by the combination of population with economic growth. So the effects of a wildly growing economy is almost on the same destructive level as dangerous addictive behaviour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2119701,00.html
One way to reduce smoking is to require that the nicotine content of cigarettes be slowly reduced over about 25 years. The idea being to reduce the number of teenagers who get hooked and to slowly ween smokers off the drug.
Ah yes. Love the nanny state.
No trans-fats. Seat-belts on. Stub-out the cig. Fork over an extra grand for air-bags. We cannot be trusted. We must be instructed. We will obey.
Trust me to own a gun? Sky-dive? Mix pool-chemicals? Raise kids? Sure... But never, ever, trust me with a nicotine hit.
On the last post, about guns, the Sacramento Bee on Sunday, July 8, 2007 had a huge headline lamenting, "Killer Guns".
Silly me! And to think I thought that only people could use weapons. I have fogotten about the many gun models incapable of killing anything.
I guess the robot armament industry was farther along than I suspected.
Thankyou for speaking out on this issue. Tobacco use is a big problem in our country and throughout the world. The real "kicker" is that tobacco-related illnesses can be prevented.
"Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, killing more than 400,000
Americans every year. Yet tobacco products are among the most unregulated consumer products
on the market today and are exempt from important consumer protections such as ingredient
disclosure, product testing and restrictions on marketing to children."
"The public health community, including the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association,
American Lung Association and the Campaign for TobaccoFree
Kids, are united in support of
legislation to grant the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) strong, effective authority over tobacco products. Among other things,
this legislation would allow the FDA to restrict tobacco marketing and sales to youth, require the
elimination or reduction of harmful chemicals in tobacco products and cigarette smoke, and regulate
dangerous and misleading health claims."
Also, the American Cancer Society is in support of highering the Federal Tobacco Tax. "The public health benefits resulting from higher cigarette pack costs are well-documented. Studies show that a 10% increase in the price per pack reduces youth smoking by 7% percent and overall cigarette consumption by about 4%. This decrease in smoking will save lives."
Prevention, smoking cessation programs, and smoke-free communities are vital in decreasing the harmful effects of tobacco on our communities. This is a public health issue-falls along the same lines as employees washing their hands at any restaurant. Time to open our eyes and realize, this habit is not "cool". As a non-smoker and a cancer survivor, it is horrible to be subjected to secondhand smoke. Everyone has to breath to live, but why do I have to inhale someone else's dirty habit?
If anyone wants to check out more on raising tobacco taxes, FDA regulation of tobacco products, etc-visit www.acscan.org