Health Hazards of Cigarettes

The dangers of smoking are well known to most Americans who still smoke in this decade, yet smokers still persist in the single most avoidable cancer risk. Smokers and nonsmokers alike are aware of the risks, as studies from each succeeding decade huild up a consistent body of evidence showing that smoke and second-hand smoke are detrimental to personal and public safety.

Although for the first time there are now more Americans who have quit smoking than who still smoke, and although the overall smoking rate among adults is now just below 25 percent, more than 43 million American men and women still smoke. Unfortunately, there has been no decline in smoking by teenagers, with 17 percent of high school seniors now smoking daily (Brody, 1993, p. 17).

The above statistics will be examined in view of the health hazards of cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, second-hand smoke, and the tobacco companies' reactions to the unprecedented wave of anti-smoking sentiment. In a desperate bid to fight back against an increasing wave of anti-smoking sentiment in America, tobacco companies are courting a very lucrative foreign market, as home sales begin to decline. The incidence of smoking is declining, at least among adults (teenage smoking is actually increasing--some would say because of the Joe Camel cartoon advertisements).

The evidence indicating cigarettes are a direct or contributory cause of cancer is staggering. Other forms of tobacco, such as smokeless tobacco, or "snuff," a

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The percentage of smokeless tobacco use was almost half that of cigarettes, bearing out findings that snuff use is on the rise among the young: "Popular drugs among children this age (8th grade) were cigarettes (45 percent) and smokeless tobacco (21 percent)" (Section C, Home Desk, p. 14). The pervasiveness of smoking in American culture is more apparent in the subgroup of American teenagers. If approximately less than one-fourth of Americans still smoke (Brody, 1993, p. 17), teenagers (presumably not counted in Brody's survey since they are minors and not permitted by law to smoke in the first place), smoke more than their adult counterparts. An article by Cindy Hall (1994) in USA Today reports the following: "Based upon 1991 figures from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.7% of children age 12 smoke--4.9% of children age 13, 8.9% of children age 14, 16.3% of children age 15, 25.2% of children age 16, and 37.2% of children age 17" (Section A, p. 1). Smokeless tobacco, once used predominantly in the South, is now pervasive in the country as a whole. In fact, as Virginia Daughety (1994) reports in the Journal of the American Dental Association, teenage boys in Iowa appear to continue using smokeless tobacco (ST

Category: Medical - H