Controlling Smoking

You get the idea.

Lung cancer is spooky, so we've to control it, somehow. Since it's so much related to smoking, the "elixir" is stopping smoking!

The problem with smoking

You shouldn't throw cigarettes onto the beach, but
never mind, you (should) get the idea.

As you may suspect, the very main cause of lung cancer is smoking as shown by statistics, so the best way to control the spread of lung cancer is to reduce tobacco use and stop smoking! According to CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, there are list of challenges that the America’s government should implement to reduce the tobacco use. One of them is to support the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which was formed in response to global problem of rising tobacco use to develop regulatory strategies.

A typical cigarette advertisement.

Next, another challenge is to reduce the broadcast of advertisement of tobacco companies to the society especially the youth. Think about this, the customers for tobacco industries are smokers, so they would need to establish “replacement smokers” for those  who quit or die.  They use advertisements to influence younger people to smoke, so that they will continue smoking until adulthood.

Sadly to say, they have succeeded. In America, the rate of tobacco smoking among teenagers is higher than it is among adults as late. According to a 2007 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 50 percent of high school students had tried smoking cigarettes. In 2008, more than 25% of children aged 12 and above were using tobacco, which equals to about 71 million teens that were smoking cigarettes, and that's for the United States of America only! However, in Malaysia, cigarette advertisements have been banned since 2003.

Increasing the prices of
cigarettes may prove effective.

Moreover, increasing tobacco taxes is another tactic, considered perhaps the most effective way to reduce tobacco use. A 10% increase in the price of cigarettes is generally accepted to result in at least a 7% reduced demand for tobacco among youth and 4% among adults, according to the CDC. In Malaysia, the government  imposed a 16% excise duty increase of RM 0.03 to RM 0.22 per stick in 2010. In addition, the government also enforced the ruling that the minimum price of a cigarette should be at least RM 0.35 per stick or RM 7.00 per pack of 20 sticks. There's also the restriction that cigarettes shouldn't be sold to those below 18, but too bad that's not working. 

However, reducing tobacco use requires the efforts and talents of many people, working together, for quite some time to come. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND ON HIS OWN, so for this to succeed, we'll need everyone's help.

A picture says a thousand words

Recently, there are many countries which mandate large graphic pictorial warnings on cigarette packs such as Canada (the first country to adopt), Mexico and Malaysia. Pictures are posted on the cover of the cigarette packs which can be seen clearly for the smoker so that it will give a clear message to smokers to have awareness about the effects of smoking for example lung cancer. The pictures are collections of advice, causes and consequences of smoking as well as comparison between a healthy and an infected organ. Here are some of them:



Malaysians, seen this before?



Warning label from Canada.

From the United States of America.

From Iran.

Research done by International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health of placing large graphic pictorial warnings on cigarette packs show decent results as people start to reconsider whether they want to continue or to quit smoking. These are the results for a research, directed towards 140 Malaysian smokers, where half of them are exposed to pictorial warnings while the other half aren't. It shows how the smokers think about smoking and their quit intentions.

Smoker’s response	Exposed to old-text warnings (N = 70)		Exposed to new pictorial warnings (N = 70)
	Before Frequency (%)	After Frequency (%)	Before Frequency (%)	After Frequency (%)
Reading or looking closely at labels	13 (18.6)	4 (5.7)	9 (13.0)	12 (17.4)
Thinks about the harm	8 (11.4)	8 (11.4)	8 (11.6)	20 (29.0)
Thinks about quitting	14 (20.0)	17 (24.3)	15 (21.7)	27 (39.1)
Foregoing smoking a cigarette	22 (31.4)	22 (31.4)	17 (24.6)	40 (58.0)
Avoids thinking about the label (coz' it's disgusting?)	14 (20.0)	29 (41.4)	6 (8.7)	34 (49.3)
Quit intention
No interest	22 (31.4)	20 (28.6)	25 (35.7)	12 (17.1)
Interested beyond 6 months	29 (41.4)	30 (42.9)	30 (42.9)	28 (40.0)
Interested within 6 months	7 (10.0)	10 (14.3)	6 (8.6)	17 (24.3)
Interested within the next month	12 (17.1)	10 (14.3)	9 (12.9)	13 (18.6)

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2996227/

Look closely at the quit intentions: those exposed to pictorial warnings are more concerned about the consequences of smoking and become more tempted to quit smoking, most of them as early as a month! =D

I guess a picture really says a thousand words. Thanks for reading.

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