Most Smokers Want to Quit Few Succeed

Most smokers want to quit and a majority have tried, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released on Thursday. The CDC numbers show that most tobacco users know that they should stop— but still struggle to kick the habit.

In 2010, 68.8 percent of American adult smokers said they wanted to quit and 52 percent said they have tried to within the past year, according to the CDC report. Nearly 32 percent had used counseling or medications in their efforts, and 48 percent got advice from a health care provider in the past year.

Yet only 6 percent had recently managed to quit smoking altogether.

“More than two-thirds of smokers want to quit smoking and more than half tried to quit last year,” CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a statement. “Smokers who try to quit can double or triple their chances by getting counseling, medicine, or both. Other measures of increasing the likelihood that smokers will quit as they want to include hard–hitting media campaigns, 100 percent smoke–free policies, and higher tobacco prices.”

The CDC used data from more than 27,000 people interviewed as part of the National Health Interview Survey in 2010.

Encouragingly, the survey showed more adults ages 25-64 tried to kick the habit, said Tim McAfee, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. But there’s noticeable variation: Those with more education were more likely to have recently quit than their less-educated peers. Those with insurance are far more likely to quit than the uninsured.

Of particular interest, McAfee said, was the finding that “blacks had the highest interest in quitting and highest number of quit attempts, but lowest success rate — 3.3 percent.”

“This is also a group three times more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes,” McAfee noted. They are also less likely to turn to counseling or medication in their efforts to stop smoking.

“What we’re concerned about, honestly, is that society is losing its enthusiasm for supporting smokers,” McAfee said. “One of our biggest concerns is that many of the states have drastically cut back their efforts, not only because of tough economic times.”

Those cutbacks have occurred as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have made it easier to get quit-smoking services. Until recently, Medicaid did not offer states the flexibility to help smokers quit with medication or counseling, said McAfee; and until recently, Medicare only offered such services to seniors who had already contracted a smoking-related disease, said Ann Malarcher, who led the CDC study.

“A lot of this is momentum that CMS has in Medicaid because they’ve done the math,” McAfee said. Fewer smokers mean fewer smoking-related chronic conditions and hospitalizations—a boon both to the public health and to the CMS budget.

Tobacco use and secondhand smoke kills 443,000 Americans each year, according to CDC data. For every smoking-related death, there are 20 people with a smoking-related disease such as heart disease, cancer, or lung disease.

Most Americans start smoking when they’re young. President Obama started smoking as a teenager, and only managed to quit recently—after years of public struggle. Chewing nicotine gum helped him kick the habit.

Tobacco companies continue to target young people through marketing and distribution campaigns, McAfee said. “We need to be more aggressive as a society around protecting our children—for whom this is an illegal drug—around marketing and distribution practices,” he argued.

The Food and Drug Administration was given the authority to combat the sale and marketing of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products to minors through the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The agency announced on Thursday that it has sent out warning letters to more than 1,200 retailers, mostly to chastise them for selling tobacco products to minors.

“Warning letters may be followed by civil money penalties if retailers continue to violate the law,” the FDA said in a statement. The agency has inspected more than 27,500 retail locations so far.

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Students Call For a Smoke-Free Campus

Undergraduate Student Government weighed in on the debate over creating a smoke-free campus Tuesday night by passing a senate resolution calling for the enforcement of designated smoking areas and a clarification of current smoking policy.

The administration will take an official position on changing smoking policy on the University Park Campus once it has heard from the different constituencies for faculty, staff, undergraduate students and graduate students, according to USG Director of Campus Affairs Jared Ginsburg. The other three constituencies’ representatives have passed resolutions, which are used to formally communicate interests to administration.

Residential Senator Marissa Roy, a co-author of the resolution, sees the legislation as an intermediate step toward possibly establishing a smoke-free campus in the future.

“We may be in the direction of becoming a smoke-free campus one day,” Roy said. “[Clarifying designated] smoking areas will be a first step to gauge reaction and get students used to the idea of seeing smoking limited on campus.”

Nearly 65 percent of 1,485 respondents to a USG online poll supported limiting smoking on campus, according to the resolution. A plurality of about 46 percent of the respondents favored a smoking ban and 40 percent favored a change in the university’s smoking policy that includes clarifying the location of designated smoking areas.

“I support a campus-wide ban on smoking contingent upon USC actually enforcing it,” Matthew Prusak, a freshman majoring in international relations (global business) said. “Smoking poses a health risk and it seems like the right thing to do from a health standpoint.”

USG Senate Speaker Pro Tempore Vinnie Prasad, who cast the only dissenting vote, said the resolution does not address the plurality’s views.

“While I agree with the spirit that we need to clarify all rules, I think we should have considered the 46 percent,” Prasad said.

USG had initially planned to vote on the resolution last week but tabled the legislation to settle confusion between two groups of senators — those who wanted administration to take action and those who wanted to clarify the current policy, Roy said.

The new draft added clauses aimed at clarifying and publicizing current USC smoking policy along with asking the administration to take action.

“Students don’t know what the policy is,” Ginsburg said. “They just don’t understand it. We are calling for a very clear announcement by the administration as to what the policy is and where the university falls on the issue.”

The USC Academic Senate and the USC Staff Assembly, the representative bodies of faculty and staff respectively, passed resolutions in 2010 advocating for a smoke-free campus. The academic senate’s resolution cited research findings and recommendations from the Provost’s Work and Family Life Committee, which conducted focus groups on both campuses.

“It’s not out of the realm of the really possible,” said Christopher Chomyn, a senior lecturer in the School of Cinematic Arts and the committee’s chair. “We are not leading this trend. We are way behind the curve for universities adopting smoke-free policies.”

At least 586 colleges have adopted smoke-free campus policies as of Oct. 7, including schools with large campuses such as the University of Michigan and Oregon State University, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation.

In September, the Graduate and Professional School Senate expressed its opposition to a smoking ban with a strongly worded resolution that called smoking bans “an encroachment of personal rights.”

“The lack of enforceability was a big problem we talked about,” GPSS President Ryan Estes said. “We thought there could be a lot of alternatives to create a healthier campus than a flat-out smoking ban.”

Chomyn, however, said a ban probably wouldn’t be heavily enforced.

“It’s not meant to be punitive,” he said. “It’s meant to improve the general welfare of our community.”

Because of the negative health effects associated with secondhand smoking, some smokers support the enforcement of designated smoking areas despite the inconvenience they cause.

“I’m a smoker, but I agree with the designated smoking areas,” said Jin Yong-Moon, a junior majoring in music industry. “I may harm other people if I smoke in open areas.”

Chomyn said his committee’s research showed opposition to a ban mostly comes from non-smokers, rather than smokers.

“Most of the people who are smokers seem to be in the favor of it, or at least open to it,” he said. “The push back has been from non-smokers.”

Roy also said she hopes the resolution’s urge to clarify policy will mean students learn there are already designated smoking areas on campus.

“Students in the survey were asking for something that already exists, but they didn’t know were already there,” Roy said.

In the coming months, USG will continue to work on expressing the student body’s opinion regarding USC’s smoking policy.

“USG is going to be the stalwart voice of students,” Roy said. “We want to keep our personal views out of it.”

The resolution will remain effective for two senate terms, taking advantage of a new bylaw amendment that allows each senator to submit one strongly supported resolution to the subsequent senate.

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