Who uses smokeless tobacco?

The 2009 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) showed that more than 3% of people aged 12 and older were current users of smokeless tobacco. Use of smokeless tobacco was higher in younger age groups, with over 6% of people aged 18 to 25 saying that they were current users.

About 1.5 million people started using smokeless tobacco in the year before the survey. Nearly half of the new users were under age 18 when they first used it.

That is supported by the CDC's 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They found that use of smokeless tobacco among high school kids is even higher than for young adults. The CDC found that more than 15% of male high school students and more than 2% of female high school students had used smokeless tobacco in the month before the survey.

The CDC Youth Tobacco Survey looked at even younger children. In their 2009 survey, nearly 3% of middle school students reported using smokeless tobacco at least once in the 30 days before the survey. The tobacco industry offers sweetened and flavored smokeless tobacco. It can taste more like candy with flavors such as vanilla, mint, and fruits, which makes it more appealing to young people.
Certain factors seem to be linked to whether or not young people will use tobacco. They include:

• Peer pressure
• Local lifestyles and fashions
• General attitudes toward authority
• Economic conditions
• Examples set by teachers and school staff
• Presence of gangs
• Use of illegal drugs and alcohol

In 2003, more than 1 in 3 major league baseball players used smokeless tobacco, mainly moist snuff. Athletes are a large marketing source for smokeless tobacco, and are often seen on TV using it during a game. As role models, they can influence youth to be more open to and accepting of smokeless tobacco.

A more recent influence on the use of smokeless tobacco is the smoking bans many states are enforcing. In light of these bans, tobacco companies have been marketing smokeless tobacco products more heavily. Smokeless tobacco products are being advertised as alternatives to cigarettes in places where smoking is not allowed. When smokers use these products as substitutes instead of trying to quit tobacco, it continues to support the tobacco industry.

Smokers who put off quitting by using smokeless tobacco for a nicotine fix while in smoke-free settings do not decrease their lung cancer risk. They are still using tobacco and still smoking cigarettes. People who use smokeless tobacco and smoke often find it harder to quit tobacco. Lung cancer risk is affected most by how long a person smokes.

Why Do Teens Smoke?

The fact that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health is hardly new information. Cigarette smoking is the single most preventable cause of disease and early death in the United States. So why do so many teens continue to smoke? There are lots of reasons, you usually start for one reason or another and then it is really hard to quit. But you can--lots of people do.
Did you know that lung cancer caused by smoking is now the top female cancer killer, claiming 27,000 more of women's lives each year than breast cancer? And more teenage girls (about 30 percent) are smoking now than they did 10 years ago. That's a big increase.
So why do people smoke? Nicotine. Nicotine acts in the brain where it can stimulate feelings of pleasure, and pleasure feels good! It also will work as an appetite suppressant for many people; other people believe it relieves stress. Ask any model her secrets for being thin; most say caffeine and cigarettes.

Addiction
Nicotine activates areas of the brain that are involved in producing feelings of pleasure and reward. Recently, scientists discovered that nicotine raises the levels of a neurotransmitter called dopamine in the parts of the brain that produce feelings of pleasure and reward. Dopamine, which is sometimes called the pleasure molecule, is the same neurotransmitter that is involved in addictions to other drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Researchers now believe that this change in dopamine may play a key role in all addictions. This may help explain why it is so hard for people to stop smoking.

Experimental smoking usually begins the habit. Next comes occasional cigarette smoking at parties, on weekends, with friends or when trying to lose weight. This is the most dangerous stage, because it usually leads to an addictive phase, when teens become regular smokers. People who start smoking before the age of 21 have the hardest time quitting, and fewer than 1 in 10 people who try to quit smoking succeed.
There is no safe amount of smoking. Every cigarette causes some harm to the body. Once smoke touches the lips, it begins to attack living tissues, and it continues its attack wherever it goes. Cigarette smokers have less ability to carry oxygen to the rest of the body and this is why smokers have less endurance when running or participating in sports.

Smokers also get wrinkles at an earlier age. The smoke changes the elasticity of the skin and fine lines appear around the eyes and mouth. Your clothes and hair will smell from smoke and pretty soon you can no longer smell it. Kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray.

Smoking Can Make You Sick
Smokers miss more days of school and work than nonsmokers because they get more respiratory infections (colds, coughs, sore throats, and sinus and ear problems). The infections are a result of damage to cilia in the lungs. Cilia are tiny parts of the lung that act like little brooms, sweeping out bacteria, viruses and dirt. When they stop clearing the lungs, the germs and dirt stay there, resulting in more frequent and longer-lasting colds.

Quitting Smoking
Quitting smoking is possible. Every year, 2 million Americans stop smoking. But it's not easy. It requires motivation from the smoker and may take several attempts before success is permanent. The average number of attempts is believed to be three.
There is no right way to quit. Many smokers report they can quit abruptly--better known as "cold turkey." Others report quitting gradually by decreasing the number of cigarettes smoked each day. Those who are interested in quitting can talk with their health care provider or, in the United States, call the American Cancer Society at (800) 227-2345 or the American Lung Association at (800) 586-4872 for useful information on how to quit.
If you are thinking about smoking, the only way to avoid getting hooked on cigarettes is never to start in the first place. And with the price of cigarettes as high as they are today, you will have all that extra money if you stop smoking. Yes, you can do it!

Q. Is smokeless tobacco safer than cigarettes?
A. No! It's true that many people think smokeless tobacco (also known as chewing tobacco or snuff) isn't as bad as cigarettes. One study quoted said that 77 percent of kids thought cigarette smoking was very harmful, but only 40 percent thought smokeless tobacco was harmful.

The truth is that smokeless tobacco use is connected with all sorts of problems. Smokeless tobacco can cause bleeding gums and sores of the mouth that never heal. Eventually you may end up with cancer of the tongue or salivary glands. Tobacco is tobacco: it all contains nicotine, and nicotine is very addictive! It stains your teeth a yellowish-brown color. It gives you bad breath. It can make you dizzy, give you the hiccups and even make you throw up--definitely not cool!

Celebrities killed by tobacco

Many of us watched the Oscar award ceremony over the past weekend, which is always very entertaining and includes a good deal of reminiscing about past great actors. As I watched some of the great old faces flash across the screen I was reminded how many of them had their life and career brought to a premature end by smoking-caused disease.
In the United States, many people are aware of the fact that great stars such as Yul Bryner , Michael Landon and John Wayne were killed by tobacco, but in fact many more stars have been killed by their smoking than we are generally aware of. Part of it is an understandable desire to preserve some privacy for the person at the end of their life. But in the case of smoking-caused illnesses, it seems that the media sometimes goes out of its way not to mention the ultimate cause of death in a way that they don’t do when it comes to drug or AIDS related deaths. It is not uncommon for newspaper reports also to simply refer to the cause of death as “cancer” rather than to specify it as lung cancer, even when the diagnosis was clear and obtainable in the public domain.

Here is how Professor Simon Chapman (University of Sydney) referred to this phenomenon with regard to the death of George Harrison, in his excellent book on public health:
"His death on 29 November 2001 from smoking caused lung cancer was noted in some reports as if he had died from any other cause, despite losing more than 20 years off the average life expectancy of a 58 year old man. Indeed the ABC network in the USA went so far as to note that unlike many other rock stars of his generation (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison) Harrison had died of "natural causes"44. If we assume Harrison took up smoking at the age of 15, and on average smoked 20 cigarettes a day, he therefore smoked for around 43 years, smoking 314,115 cigarettes in that time. Observations of smoking show that a cigarette takes about 5.6 minutes to smoke45. We can therefore calculate that Harrison had a cigarette alight for a cumulative total of 1221.6 days or 3.34 years of his 58 years. Recalling that he lost about 20 years off normal life expectancy for an Englishman, we can calculate that each of the 314,115 cigarettes he smoked took 33.5 minutes off his life – about 6 times longer than the time it took him to smoke each one."

I’m not writing this article to argue that celebrities shouldn’t smoke because of their role model status. Celebrities have the same right to smoke as anyone else, and the same human tendency to become addicted to the nicotine in tobacco and to be killed by it. Rather I think it is worth recognizing how much poorer the world is for having lost so many talented people too early. I suspect that George C Scott had a few more good movies in him, George Harrison a few more songs, and Peter Jennings a few more news stories. So rather than berate our current smoking celebrities, I think we should make sure they can get access to effective treatment and succeed in quitting.

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Several top Hollywood celebrities have succumbed to their awful habit of smoking harmful tobacco filled cigarettes in the recent past. People from across the globe have picked up this habit only after viewing their favorite celebrity smoking harmful cigarettes either on or off screen. Nonetheless, the impact of such incidences is rather traumatizing as hundreds of millions of individuals take to smoking harmful tobacco filled cigars on a daily basis and end up dying a slow yet terrible death.  Cancers of the mouth as well as the lung region are fairly common to people who happen to be chain smokers.

If we are to mention Hollywood celebrities, then it would not be incorrect to state that several top Hollywood stars have actually died smoking cigarettes daily. One such star happens to be Audrey Hepburn, who was a sensation in her own times and known the world over for super hit flicks such as “My Fair Lady” as well as the “Nuns Story”. She was known to ignore her mother’s warnings and smoked three to four packs of tobacco filled cigarettes on her worst days. Owing to her bad habit, she suffered from asthma and then suffered from cancer before passing away at the age of 63. Another Hollywood celebrity who claimed she would never quit smoking as she was completely addicted to cigarettes was Gwyneth Paltrow. Brad Pitt was supposedly irate at her chain smoking habit and often told her to stop doing so but his words fell on deaf ears.

Kate Moss is yet another example of a chain smoker. Yet celebrities need to understand that they need to quit smoking or adopt healthier smoking options such as electronic cigarette smoking, as they are aped by millions of people worldwide. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Johnny Depp and many other top Hollywood celebrities have stopped smoking normal cigarettes and adopted the safer and healthier option of smoking electronic cigarettes instead. Not only is this safe for their body, it also ensures that they never get infected by the dreaded cancer of the lungs and mouth or suffer from miscarriages and numerous fatal diseases pertaining to smoking tobacco filled cigarettes.

The main reason why E Cigarettes are considered safe for human consumption is because they do not produce smoke and are completely devoid of tobacco. As no harmful chemicals are released in the air, the fact remains that you may smoke an E Cig even in a “No-Smoking” zone. Unless you opt for the safe E-Cigarettes, you would always be speaking like Gloria Swanson in the movie Sunset Boulevard, when your picture needs to be touched upon by several make up cessions to make you appear young and flawless.

Mother sues tobacco store for selling herbal mixture which mimics pot to son

Teen dies in car accident after smoking a popular boutique, synthetic marijuana.

A Chicagoland mother is suing a tobacco store after her 19 year old son, Max Dobner, died in a car accident earlier this summer.  Max reportedly bought the mixture of herbs called IAroma Hypnotic which Max’s mother, Karen Dobner claims has synthetic marijuana in it. She further alleges that the teen smoked the mixture and then drove off the road at 100 MPH, driving into a house and resulting in her son’s death. The smoking mixture is said to be one of the new boutique, synthetic marijuana mixtures which has seen a steady increase in popularity. With celebrities like Miley Cyrus reportedly smoking similar substances at Hollywood parties, those looking to obtain an alternative to marijuana, which is illegal, have turned to these boutique synthetic “drugs” in order to get high.

Many states have banned the substances, but the government and authorities are having a hard time keeping up with the new ones, released under new names with new formularies. Authorities say that new mixtures come out on the market as quickly as soon as the old one is removed.

According to CBS Chicago, the synthetic marijuana industry has quickly grown into a 1 billion dollar industry.

Max’s mother  is now suing the tobacco store which sold her son the mixture. At the time, it was marketed as potpourri. She claims the package failed to mention that synthetic marijuana was included.

The tobacco store who sold Max the product, Cigar Box, located in Aurora, Illinois, is now out of business.