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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Smokers are influenced by package color

PACKAGING colour, slim cigarettes, a smooth taste. Many smokers believe these three factors each represent a safer smoke cigarette package

A study published in the journal Addiction reveals that one-in-five smokers believe “some cigarette brands could be less harmful than others”, with many basing their idea of risk on the colour of the packaging.

In fact all conventional brands of cigarettes present the same risk to smokers, regardless of whether they are ‘mild’ or ‘low-tar’.

The belief may stem from old branding of cigarettes as ‘mild’ or ‘light’.

Tobbacco companies are no longer allowed to describe their brand with these terms because they are misleading, but most simply changed them to a colour. What used to be Marlboro Lights are now Marlboro Golds.

The effect is that many smokers now equate light colours – such as gold, silver and white – with low-risk cigarettes.

The study surveyed over 8000 current and former smokers in Australia, the UK, US and Canada. False beliefs were higher in the UK and US.

The research also revealed many smokers believe they are safer if they smoke a slimmer or filtered cigarette or one with a smoother taste, and are under the impression that nicotine is responsible for most of the cancer caused by cigarettes.

Dr David Hammond, one of the researchers on the study, said “the findings highlight the deceptive potential of ‘slim’ cigarette brands targeted primarily at young women”.

“The findings also support the potential benefits of plain packaging regulations that will soon take effect in Australia, under which all cigarettes will be sold in packages with the same plain colour, without graphics or logos.”

Under proposed legislation aimed at reducing smoking rates in Australia, all logos will be removed from cigarette packaging, and tobacco companies will be required to print their brand name in a specific font.

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History of menthol cigarettes

Menthol cigarette smokers can exhale in relief: their Kools won’t be losing their cool anytime soon.salem menthol

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has declined to recommend a ban on menthol cigarettes, even though the study group conceded that a ban would improve public health. The decision follows a 2009 federal ban on candy flavorings in cigarettes because of their potential allure for young smokers.

The panel’s decision not to recommend a menthol ban is potentially a big victory for tobacco companies, in particular Lorillard Inc., makers of Newport, the country’s top-selling menthol cigarette. Lorillard’s stock price jumped more than 10 percent shortly after a draft of the panel’s report was made public.

The FDA isn’t required to follow the advice of its advisory committees, but it usually does. The panel’s pronouncement makes it more likely that menthol will continue its curious history as the world’s most popular flavor additive in cigarettes. An Ohio man named Lloyd “Spud” Hughes is credited with introducing American smokers to the refreshing taste of menthol cigarettes in 1925. Hughes was working as a cashier in a restaurant when he came up with the idea of adding menthol flavoring to give the illusion of a “cooler” smoke. Thus was born Spud brand cigarettes, the first widely sold menthol smoke in America. By 1932, Spuds had become the fifth most popular cigarettes in the country.

The success of Spud caught the attention of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, which launched its own menthol brand, Kool, in 1932. Kool was initially targeted to upscale smokers; the brand’s mascot was a cartoon penguin sporting a monocle and top hat. And menthol smokes really took off in 1956, when R.J. Reynolds introduced Salem, the first filter-tipped menthol cigarette.

Neither the filter nor the menthol protected smokers from the harmful effects of cigarettes, but tobacco companies shamelessly promoted menthol cigarettes as being somehow “fresher,” and, by implication, healthier. In the early ’70s, Salem print ads touted the brand’s “natural” menthol. “That’s what gives Salem a taste as soft and fresh as Springtime,” the ads declared. Later, the makers of menthol Newport began a long-running campaign touting the brand as being “Alive with Pleasure.”

Today, about 30 percent of all cigarettes sold in the U.S. are flavored with menthol. (Oddly, only two countries in the world have higher rates of menthol cigarette use¬—the Philippines and Cameroon.) And since the 1960s, menthol cigarette consumption in the U.S. has had a distinctly racial component. Currently, 80 percent of African American smokers prefer menthol cigarettes, and blacks are four times more likely than whites to choose menthols.

No one really knows how African Americans came to prefer menthol cigarettes in the first place. But relentlessly targeted marketing campaigns locked the preference in place, part of what Phillip Gardiner, a research scientist at the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program at the University of California calls the “African-Americanization of menthol cigarette use.”

“Menthol cigarettes have been marketed to some of the most vulnerable segments of the population,” Gardiner says. “For half a century, people with the least resources and the most to lose have been the target of this product.”

Internal tobacco company research in the early 1950s showed a slight preference for menthol Kools among African American smokers, and firms quickly capitalized by marketing menthol smokes directly to blacks. African American baseball player Elston Howard was an early spokesman for menthol Kools in the late 1950s. “You feel a new smoothness deep in your throat,” proclaimed ads featuring Howard, a star catcher for the New York Yankees.

In the late 1970s, the makers of Newport used the James Brown hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” to trumpet the message “Newport is a whole new bag of menthol smoking.” Later, the Kool Jazz Festival and hip-hop concerts were used to promote menthols among African Americans. Menthol smokes soon acquired an edgy urban quality—a dangerous smoke. “Smokin’ mad Newports/’cause I’m due in court,” the Notorious B.I.G. rapped on his 1994 hit “Everyday Struggle.” The FDA advisory committee report notes the longstanding popularity of menthol among African Americans, but skirts the issue of how that preference came to be.

In the face of a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes, Lorillard, makers of industry-leading Newport, has framed the debate as nothing less than a civil rights issue. One Lorillard promotional ad depicts an African American woman accompanied by the headline “Freedom of Choice for Grown Folks.” The ad notes that “the history of African Americans in this country has been one of fighting against paternalistic limitations and for freedoms” and that adults should have the freedom to choose to smoke menthol cigarettes.

Some black leaders have taken up the mentholated banner. Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, publicly opposed a ban on menthol cigarettes, arguing that it unfairly targeted African Americans. Leaders of two African American police organizations published op-ed pieces contending that a menthol ban would only lead to an illegal market—in effect arguing that eliminating one black market would create another.

In the end, the FDA panel decided not to recommend an outright ban on menthol, even though the panel admitted that it’s “biologically plausible” that adding menthol to cigarettes makes them more addictive. In fact, a 2010 meta-study by two researchers from Ohio State University concluded that while menthol cigarettes aren’t more harmful than regular smokes, the menthol flavoring often makes it harder for smokers to quit. The researchers found lower quit rates and higher relapse rates among menthol cigarette smokers compared to smokers of non-flavored cigarettes.

But for now, lovers of menthol cigarettes can breathe easier—assuming their lungs still function. Menthol cigarettes are likely to be around for the foreseeable future, easily outliving the folks who enjoy them.

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