Abdulmohsen
Alkahtani
Smoking
In this century,
many people smoke different kinds of tobacco such as cigarettes and hookah. And
also, there are many companies which produce different kinds of tobacco, and
these kinds of companies make a lot of money which is approximately equal to
the income of some countries. Yet, the problem is there are many young people
who smoke a lot which could cause a big problem for their health, society, or
economy. There are a lot of questions, but the most important questions are: What
are the major causes and effects of smoking, and what are the possible ways of
quitting smoking. While there are some people who think that smokers cannot
quit smoking, there are several ways to quit smoking.
Reasons People Smoke:
Smoking tobacco has
an old history. According to Pampel (2004) tobacco was discovered before 5000
years ago, and it was used for medical purpose and religious properties; after
that young people have used tobacco feel relaxed and fun; then it spread widely
in the world. Also, smoking has been debated during the past years by society.
During the seventeenth century, religious leaders and statesmen in many countries
condemned the use of tobacco. Smokers were excommunicated by the church, and
some of them were condemned to death and executed. This
history is providing that those leaders had known the danger of smoking on
people and they tried to protect people from dangers of smoking.
The world Health Organization and all
medical organizations 2010 emphasized that smoking is the biggest risk facing
humanity today. “Estimates of the number of yearly deaths from smoking –
related causes exceed 400,000 (about one-sixth of all deaths), and smokers can
expect to die 13-14 years earlier than nonsmokers. The situation has improved
since the famous 1964 report of the surgeon general on the harm of cigarettes, but
it remains serious. Despite falling cigarette use in past decades, 23 percent of
the U.S. population in the year 2000 smoked, and another 22 percent used to
smoke –making nearly half the population vulnerable to the risks of early
death. Worse, young people today continue to adopt the habit at about the same
rate as 10 years ago” (Pampel, 2010, 3).
These numbers show us the real danger of smoking and how smoking kills
more than what wars kill, but the most important question here is how we can
help smokers to quit smoking.
Smoking behavior
is learning behavior which means it is not a genetic thing, but it comes by
learning other habits. For example, “George attends a party and meets this
lovely young thing who is wearing a certain distinctive perfume. They have a
very pleasant time at the party and warm feelings are aroused. A few weeks
later, George walks into the library at school and smells that perfume. He
finds himself experiencing some very pleasant feeling and looking around to see
if the young woman is there. Up to the time he went to the party, the perfume
would have been just a pleasant aroma, or, conceivably, he wouldn’t have even
liked it. Now he feels good when he smells it” (Kish, 1988, 8). If we look carefully
to this example we will find that learning how to smoke starts when you spend a
lot of time with other smokers, who just smoke while you have a pleasant time
with them. So, here is the beginning of learning how to smoke tobacco.
According to Kish (1988), there are three possible ways to learn smoking (8-15):
I.
Associative
learning: which is you associate events that occur close together in time and respond
to them in a similar way;
II.
Instrumental
learning: this is that kind of behavior which functions to get a payoff for the
person; and
III.
Modeling
learning: this way define learning behavior by observe others.
In the first way, a lot of ads on TV try to associate a positive
feeling while watching one of their products. “A few years back, there was an
ad on TV showing a beautiful, slim, tanned young woman in a snow-white bikini
who undulated toward the camera and started drinking a cold can of Sprite. The
idea was to have you associate the positive feeling which you had toward the
girl with Sprite so that when your eyes fell upon the cans of Sprite at the
supermarket, you would experience some of these warm feeling” (Kish, 1988, 8).
The second way focuses on how learned behavior pays off. For example, when you
have headache you learn take an aspirin which is the behavior; so your headache
will be relieved, which is the payoff. In this example, people learn how to
smoke as behavior of getting upset, so coming down after they smoke becomes as
pay off of this behavior. The third way is how young people learn to smoke from
older people. For example, boys observe their parents who are smokers, so these
boys will learn how to smoke automatically from their parents.
Effects of smoking:
Smoking causes a lot of effects on
people health such as their body system, respiratory system, and also passive
smoker who are nonsmoker people. Many studies point out that there are a lot of
dangerous problems which can smoke cause especially on respiratory system. “The
acute effects of cigarette smoke upon the respiratory tract include: (1) a
depression of function in the ciliae lining the airway; (2) a stimulation of
mucus production by the goblet cells of the bronchial lining; (3) a varying
amount of bronchospasm. Chronic exposure may cause chronic bronchitis,
emphysema and various forms of lung cancer” (Shephard, 1982, 73). And also, there
are many symptoms of health effects on the respiratory system, especially upon
children such as “wheezing, coughing, and sputum production, are increased in
children of smoking parents” (National Research Council, 1986, 9). Beside that
smoking can cause lung cancer for nonsmoking people and this is what some
studies found out, “among studies of various populations in Europe, Asia, and
North America, the risk of lung cancer is roughly 30% higher for nonsmoking
spouses of smoker than it is for nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers” (National
Research Council, 1986, 10).
Smokers should notice that smoking not only
causes problems in respiratory system, but also causes some damage in their
body system. There are some serious effects on smoker’s body. One of these
effects is “every exposure to tobacco, from occasional smoking or secondhand
smoke, can damage DNA in ways that lead to cancer” (Szabo, 2011, 15B).
In this effect we can see clearly the biggest problem which smoking can do for
smokers. In addition to that, smoking can cause the most dangerous health
effect which is heart attack. And also, smoking can make negative effects on
women especially pregnant women. According to Stratton (2001), there is health
effect of smoking on pregnant women especially in rate of birth which means the
rate of birth will go down if pregnant women have exposure to any kind of
tobacco during the pregnancy period.
Now there is an important question
someone might ask: are there any health effects for secondhand smoke? The
answer is yes; there are many health effects can smoke cause upon passive
smoking people such as heart attack and lung cancer. “Under conditions of poor
ventilation, non-smokers could inhale the equivalent of the smoking of four
cigarettes over the course of a single hour; on this basis, benzpyrene from
regular and heavy passive exposure would cause two cases of lung cancer per
year in a group of 100,000 non-smokers” (Shephard, 1982, 95). Moreover, smoking
can make children at risk from passive exposure to cigarette smoke. According
to Shephard (1982), children are attacked from both air pollutants and respiratory
pathogens due to a high respiratory minute volume of body mass; and infants
probably have no chance to move away from a chain-smoking mother.
Ways to quit:
When we look at
all of these negative effects, we should think about how we can help those
people, who just started smoking, to quit their bad habit and become healthy as
normal people. There are several ways to quit smoking and different methods.
Yet, smokers should know that they are able to quit smoking
without any pain or difficulties. “For
example, in cases where long-term smokers successfully quit permanently, some
common factors emerge: They did not suffer more than very moderate
physical withdrawal symptoms, they lost the psychological need to smoke almost
immediately, They did not experience any of the difficulties that are
traditionally linked by smokers to giving up such as lack of concentration and they
described it as ‘easy’, ‘painless’, ‘no big deal’ or a ‘non-event” (Shah, et. al, 2004, 27).
Here are five
important steps could help smokers to quit smoking, according to the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services in How You Can Help Patients to Stop Smoking (1991):
a)
First,
obtain smoker’s history: so we must understand the smoking habit of smokers
before we start drawing the strategy which is effective for them (U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, 1991, 13)
b)
Second,
prepare smokers to be ready to quit: if smoker shows us readiness to quit, we
have to set a quit date. So we should let smokers decide when to quit and how
to do it. And also, there are three techniques we should teach smokers to help
them quitting smoking such as stop, think, and act. Stop: teach them how to say
stop to themselves, Think of why they try to quit and think that they can wait
out the urge, Act like get up and move around, keep their hands busy, talk to a
friend, breathe deeply, and chew sugarless gum (U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, 1991, 13-14)
c)
Third,
discuss relapse prevention: in this step we should help smokers to quit smoking
in three step strategy: .( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991, 15-16)
I.
Educate
smokers: Sort out common causes of relapse such as sad feeling, upset, and
worried. Warn the first time quitter about the dangers of testing his/her
abstinence. Explain that smoking one
cigarette does not end the effort to quit.
II.
Support
quitter: By encourage him/her to keep going to reach his/her aim, which is quitting
smoking.
III.
Prepare
smokers for coping with a relapse.
d)
Fourth,
address weight-related issues: This step include four ways to help smokers
quitting: ( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991, 16-17)
1.
Help
smokers put weight gain into proper perspective: by giving some information
about the facts of losing weight when they smoke, and what is the expected
change in their weight if they quit.
2.
Help
smokers control their weight as much as possible: by suggest some steps to
control their weight while they follow the program of quit smoking.
3.
Help
smokers alleviate constipation: by recommending special diet.
4.
Adapt
your suggestion to smokers: by encourage the behavior changes that are possible
and recognize your quitter limits.
e)
Finally,
follow up and provide maintenance
support for the quitters (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991,
17-18).
There are also
some methods, which could help smokers to make the decision, to quit smoking. One
of them is called Ben Franklin method of decision making. “In the Ben Franklin
method, you take a sheet of paper and rule it down the middle. One column is
headed pros (+) and other cons (-). Then you list all the pros and cons you can
think of. To do a good job, you should research the subject to some extent.
Discuss it with your friends. Find out why they smoke and what they get out of
it. Look at your own feelings. Can you think of what you get out of smoking?
List them” (Kish, 1988, 21).
In conclusion,
Smoking is not a good thing for our community, especially when we know all of
the serious effects of smoking. As well we already know the causes of smoking
which can help us to find a way to protect the next generation from fall into
this terrible disease. Moreover, quitting smoking is not too tough for smokers,
who have willpower, to quit smoking by following the proper program for them to
quit smoking. Smokers will find themselves having a healthy life just as normal
people if they quit smoking soon. Of course, causes of smoking might be
different from person to another, but we can work to support smokers to quit by
following ways of quit smoking. Last but not least, we should know that
prevention is better than treatment.
References
Alder, H., Morris, K., & Shah, D. (2002). Don’t
stop smoking until you’ve read this book. Oxford how to books, Ltd.
Kish, G. (1988). Quit
smoking painlessly. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc.
National Research
Council. (1986). Environmental tobacco smoke: Measuring exposures and
assessing health effects. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Pampel, F. (2004). Tobacco industry and
smoking. New York, NY: Facts on File, Inc.
Shephard, R.
(1982). The risks of passive smoking. Manuka, Australia: Croom Helm Ltd.
Stratton, K, (2001 ) Clearing the
Smoke: Assessing the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction. Washington, D.C; National Academies Press, 2001.
Szabo, L (2010) Report: Just one cigarette is
bad. The
Miami times, 88 (17), 15
U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services. (1991). How you can help patients stop smoking.
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
