Steve Chapman’s Feb. 20 column, “Smoke Scream!,” could have easily been written by a tobacco company PR firm. Let’s set some things straight about tobacco use. Mr. Chapman’s assertion that smoking is an adult decision about which the health community is “misleading people” is completely off the mark.
More than 80 percent of smokers begin as teenagers–teenagers who really don’t understand that nicotine is a drug capable of leading to long-term chemical dependence just as surely as crack cocaine.
When a person becomes addicted to nicotine, most often the “choice” that Mr. Chapman and the tobacco companies talk about is no longer an option for them. Although more than 70 percent of smokers say they want to quit, only 2 percent to 5 percent of them actually do quit each year. This isn’t “mass defiance,” but behavior that is driven by a $5 billion-a-year tobacco industry advertising budget that pushes an addictive drug.
Mr. Chapman quotes Harvard University economist W. Kip Viscusi to prove his point that Americans overestimate the harm caused by tobacco use. But a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that only 29 percent of current smokers believe they have a higher-than-average risk of a heart attack, and only 40 percent think they have an increased risk for cancer. Even among smokers with high blood pressure, chest pains or a family history of a heart attack, fewer than half of smokers with a second risk factor perceived their risk of a heart attack as higher than average.
On the other hand, research from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that fully half of all adult smokers will die prematurely of a tobacco-related disease, losing an average 15 years of life. It has become a well-known fact in the health and medical community that tobacco use is the leading cause of death in the United States–but it remains a little known fact in the community at large.
Finally Mr. Chapman worries that the “gruesome” photos proposed for the warning labels on packs of Canadian cigarettes and by Ald. Edward Burke for Chicago retail displays makes the health community seem “rabid” in our approach to tobacco-use prevention. We wonder what he might propose as an alternative to help make the risks of tobacco use more meaningful; current warning labels are ineffective.
In Illinois, more than 19,000 people die from tobacco use each year; thousands more suffer from tobacco-related chronic diseases, and the direct medical costs each year for the state are more than $2.3 billion.
