History of Smoking

•Mind Over Matter Smoking Cessation Means You Have To Decide To Break The Habit
Smoking cessation is about habit cessation—if you want to stop smoking, you have to defeat your mind and not your body. The common belief about smoking over the last 50 years is that smokers are physically addicted to tobacco, particularly nicotine. While it is true that the body can become addicted to tobacco, research published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology from Tel Aviv University confirms what many smokers and non smokers have known all along: Smoking is a more of a psychosocial...

•Smoking Leads To A Shorter Life
Smoking leads to a shorter life. Sounds like a dramatic news headline, but there is nothing dramatic or comical about it: smoking will kill you faster, plain and simple. One of the main reasons you should quit smoking if you have a tobacco habit is because quitting today will start to build your life expectancy back up. Let's take a look at some of the ways in which smoking affects your life expectancy so that you can make the decision to change your habits today. We are all well aware that...

•Closet smokers and the burden of secrecy Closet Smokers and Their Burden of Secrecy
Despite the fact that smoking is still widely prevalent and Big Tobacco company hasn't relinquished the will to continue marketing its products, cigarettes have actually become quite taboo in recent years. Whereas they were a status symbol in the 1950's and 60's (Think of a chain smoking Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's or any of the big shots in Madmen), cigarettes have now been relegated to the plain of trashy and unhealthy-socially frowned upon and seen as a marker of bad taste. The...

•If We Want Teens To Stop Smoking We Have To Understand Why They Start
If you want to stop smoking you should probably know why you started—there is always a reason for everything. If we want to help teens stop smoking, then we must ask: what is it that makes a teen light up their first cigarette? Is it Big Tobacco advertising? Stress? Friends or parents? The teenage years are a habit forming stage of life and in the rush to be cool or deal with the complicated modern world, smoking is an easy habit to pick up. There are over 280,000,000 Australians teens who...

•Smoking and Fire Safety
One of the potentially fatal side effects of smoking that people often forget to discuss is the risk of fire. Thousands of people across the globe are killed or badly injured each year in smoking-related fires. According to the National Fire Protection Agency in the United States, cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia like matches and lighters are the number one cause of civilian fire deaths. This is just another example of how much destruction smoking and cause outside of the smoker's physical...

•Smoker s Cough Is Not an Excuse It Is Never Too Late to Quit Smoking
Smokers have a plethora of excuses when it comes to avoiding smoking cessation. Some laud the spuriously positive benefits of smoking (haven't you heard? It makes you lose weight!) and some sink into a nihilistic pit, resigning themselves to the fact that they have already ruined their bodies. Many people who have developed a smoker's cough fall into the latter category, but they couldn't be further from the truth: smoker's cough or not, it is absolutely never too late to quit smoking! The...

•Avoiding the Weight Pitfalls of Smoking Cessation
If you are a smoker or you know a smoker, then you know that when it comes to quitting smokers always have an excuse, a reason for why they just aren't quite ready to give up tobacco. One of the most common excuses smokers use to avoid putting out that last cigarette is weight gain. Many smokers claim that smoking helps them keep their weight in check and they fear that if they quit, they will, to put it bluntly, get fat. If we look beyond the appalling fact that many tobacco users laud smoking...

•Psychological Effects of Marijuana
Quitting Smoking Pot Keeps Your Mental Faculties In Better Shape If you are a marijuana smoker, quitting smoking is good for your mental health. When we talk about smoking, particularly cigarettes, we are mainly concerned with identifying the physical hazards, but when it comes to smoking marijuana, the psychological hazards often pose a greater risk. Let’s take a brief look at what marijuana is, what it does and how it can affect your mental health in order to underscore the importance of...

•Why Do Doctors Claim That Smoking Is Addictive
There are has been an increasingly large divide developing in the medical community surrounding the concept that smoking is an addiction. Some doctors and scientists; such as researchers at the University of Tel Aviv, claim that smoking is merely a habit and that tobacco is not in itself addictive. On the other side, many doctors, such as the U.S. Surgeon General, claim that smoking is an addiction to nicotine. So which side is correct? We take the position that smoking is fundamentally a...

•Does Australia s Strict Approach to Tobacco Advertising Actually Help People Quit Smoking
Australia is one of the world leaders in the war against tobacco advertising. The idea has been that to help people quit smoking, the tobacco advertising industry must have its wings clipped. It has been illegal to advertise tobacco products on the radio and television since 1976 and in 1990 it became illegal to promote tobacco in Australian magazines and newspapers. The Tobacco Advertising Prohibition of 1992 now bans most forms of tobacco advertising, and plain packaging cigarettes will...