Last week, I wrote about factoid-driven myths that just refuse to die. In less than a week, the piece has had more than 1.184 million readers.
There’s plainly a big appetite for smoking myth busting, so here are 10 more.
1. Today’s smokers are all hard core, addicted smokers who can’t or won’t give up
This claim is the essence of what is known as the “hardening hypothesis”: the idea that decades of effort to motivate smokers to quit has seen all the low-hanging fruit fall from the tree, leaving only deeply addicted, heavy smokers today.
The key index of addicted smoking is the number of cigarettes smoked per day. This creates a small problem for the hardening hypothesis: in nations and states where smoking has reduced most, the average number of cigarettes smoked daily by continuing smokers has gone down, not up. This is exactly the opposite of what the hardening hypothesis would predict if remaining smokers were mostly hard core.
2. Smoking is pleasurable
Repeated studies have found that around 90% of smokers regret having started, and some 40% make an attempt to quit each year. There’s no other product with even a fraction of such customer disloyalty.
But I’m always amused at some die-hard smokers’ efforts explain that they smoke for pleasure and so efforts to persuade them to stop are essentially just anti-hedonistic tirades. Many studies have documented that the “pleasure” of smoking centres around the relief smokers get when they have not smoked for a while. The next nicotine hit takes away the discomfort and craving they have been experiencing.
This argument is a bit like saying that being beaten up every day is something you want to continue with, because hey, it feels so good when the beating stops for a while.
3. Light and mild cigarettes deliver far less tar and nicotine to the smoker than standard varieties
Several nations have outlawed cigarette descriptors such as “light” and “mild” because of evidence that such products do not deliver lower amounts of tar and nicotine to smokers, and so are deceptive.
The allegedly lower yields from cigarettes labelled this way resulted from a massive consumer fraud.
Cigarette manufacturers obtained these low readings by laboratory smoking machine protocols which took a standardized number of puffs, at a standardized puff velocity. The smoke inhaled by the machine was then collected in glass “lungs” behind the machine and the tar and nicotine weighed to give the readings per cigarette.
But the companies didn’t tell smokers two things. So-called light or mild cigarettes had tiny, near-invisible pin-prick perforations just on the filter (see picture). These holes are not covered by the “lips” or “fingers” of the laboratory smoking machine, allowing extra air to be inhaled and thus diluting the dose of tar and nicotine being collected.
But when smokers use these products, two things happen. Their lips and fingers partially occlude the tiny ventilation holes, thus allowing more smoke to be inhaled. Smokers unconsciously “titrate” their smoking to obtain the dose of nicotine that their brain’s addiction centres demand: they can take more puffs, inhale more deeply, leave shorter butt lengths or smoke more cigarettes.
Today, where use of these descriptors has been stopped, the consumer deception continues with the companies using pack colours to loudly hint to smokers about which varieties are “safer”.
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4. Filters on cigarettes remove most of the nasty stuff from cigarettes
We’ve all seen the brown stain in a discarded cigarette butt. But what few have seen is how much of that same muck enters the lungs and how much stays there.
This utterly compelling video demonstration shows how ineffective filters are in removing this deadly sludge. A smoker demonstrates holding the smoke in his mouth and then exhales it through a tissue paper, leaving a tell-tale brown stain. He then inhales a drag deep into his lungs, and exhales it into a tissue. The residue is still there, but in a much reduced amount. So where has the remainder gone? It’s still in the lungs!
5. Governments don’t want smoking to fall because they are addicted to tobacco tax and don’t want to kill a goose that lays golden eggs
This is perhaps the silliest and most fiscally illiterate argument we hear about smoking. If governments really want to maximise smoking and tax receipts, they are doing a shockingly bad job of it. Smoking in Australia has fallen almost continuously since the early 1960s. In five of the 11 years to 2011, the Australian government received less tobacco tax receipts than it did the year before (see Table 13.6.6).
Plainly, as smoking continues to decline, diminishing tax returns will occur, although this will be cushioned by the rising population which will include some smokers.
In the meantime, tobacco tax is a win-win for governments and the community. It reduces smoking like nothing else, and it provides substantial transfer of funds from smokers to government for public expenditure.
Those of us who don’t smoke do not squirrel away what we would have otherwise spent on smoking in a jam jar under the bed. We spend it on other goods and services, benefiting the economy too.
6. Most smokers die from smoking caused diseases late in life, and we’ve all got to die from something
Smoking increases the risk of many different diseases, and collectively these take about ten years off normal life expectancy from those who get them.
Smoking is by far the greatest risk factor for lung cancer. In Australia, the average age of death for people with lung cancer is 71.4 (see Table 4.2), while life expectancy is currently 80.1 for men and 84.3 for women.
This means that, on average, men diagnosed with lung cancer lose 8.7 years and women 12.9 years (mean 10.8 years). Of course, some lose many more (Beatle George Harrison died at just 58, Nat King Cole at 45).