It is three in the afternoon, and you are up to your ears in homework. You have to be at your job by four, and you know when you get home at 11 p.m. more homework will be waiting. So you take a break, go outside and light up. When you come back, you are relaxed and ready to take on the stress of the day. This is the life of many young nicotine addicts.
"I smoke about every two hours," said Becca Goforth, a 21-year-old college student. Like many other smokers, Goforth has been addicted to tobacco for much longer than she has been legally able to buy it. She began when she was 16 because her friends smoked, too.
Skye McDonough, a 25-year-old smoker, said that she started when she was 15 for the same reasons as Goforth. However, McDonough also said that she remembers a time when advertisements for cigarettes were everywhere, and that ads influenced her, also.
"Tobacco advertising used to be the largest group in the industry, but now it is virtually non-existent," said John Malmo, a Memphis advertising executive for many years. There used to be no limit on where or how tobacco companies advertised. Now, ads for tobacco are not allowed on television, in many magazines or on billboards within a certain distance to schools. Malmo says that the restriction of tobacco advertising has hurt the tobacco industry, but has helped reduce the incidence of smoking, especially by young people.
However, according to the Center for Disease Control, cigarette companies spent $15.2 billion on advertising and promotions in 2003, after the implementation of restrictions on tobacco ads. These companies are finding ways to get around the rules placed on advertising by giving billions of dollars to retailers for discounts and coupons and supporting sports teams, whose games are attended by many children.
Of the 46 million adults who smoke, 28.5 percent of them are ages 18-24 years old, and an estimated five million underage smokers will die due to smoking-related illnesses, according to a 2004 report by the CDC. Also, cigarette smoking still remains the number one preventable cause of death in the United States.
Tobacco use causes many kinds of problems in the human body. It causes at least 10 different kinds of cancer, including cancers one might never think: cervical cancer in women and cancer of the bladder and kidneys. Smokers are 2-4 times more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than non-smokers. Ninety percent of all deaths from lung diseases are caused by cigarette smoking. With all these harmful affects, why do young people continue to smoke?
"I want to quit, but I don't. It's comforting," says Goforth. As someone who is going into the medical field (she is studying pre-pharmacy at the University of Memphis), she knows the harmful effects of smoking on the body. She said that she might try to quit over the summer when her life is less stressful and she is not in school. Goforth said that she has never tried to quit before because she did not want to fail and be disappointed with herself. Others simply do not want to quit smoking.
"Life's too short. I know all the health risks, and that it's gross, but when I'm ready to quit I will," said McDonough. "I quit twice before when I was pregnant, so I know I can, but I don't want to quit now."
When people decide to quit smoking, according to Joe Prescott, a certified hypnosis consultant at ABC Hypnosis, it is vital that they figure out why they started in the first place and the reasons they continue to smoke now, whether it is stress or just boredom. One way people have found a way to quit is through hypnosis.
"Hypnosis takes care of the need, desire and habit [to smoke]," said Prescott. He said that through hypnosis they can discover why a person smokes. Hypnosis takes place through a process of relaxation and breathing techniques through listening to the therapist's voice. Hypnosis allows the patient to let go of his or her conscious mind and let the sub-conscious take over. Messages are implanted into the smoker's sub-conscious that replace the need to smoke. Once the therapist discovers when and why a person smokes, he or she can replace the addict's smoking habits with healthier actions. Some smokers quit completely after the first session, but most do not. Most people need about 3 or 4 sessions to quit completely, said Prescott. At ABC, hypnotherapy costs $75 for the first session and $55 for each additional session. Hypnosis is not for everyone, and other ways may be more effective for some.
Prescription and over-the-counter medicines can often be helpful when a person decides to quit smoking. Seventy percent of smokers want to quit, and using a treatment doubles their chances of success, according to a report by the CDC. The Food and Drug Administration has approved six medications to help people stop smoking: nicotine gum, patch, nasal spray, inhaler, lozenge and a non-nicotine medicine that sends the same message to a smoker's brain that smoking a cigarette does. A person needs a prescription for most of these, except for the gum, lozenge and some brands of the patch. However, doctors are currently limited to prescribing only one type of medication at a time to a patient.
A study by the University of Tennessee Preventive Medicine is out to prove that the patch in conjunction with the non-nicotine medicine is the best way for a person to quit, according to Peggy McKnight, a research therapist for UT. Zyban is a medicine that releases certain chemicals to the brain that gives the person a sense of well-being, much like smoking a cigarette does for nicotine addicts. The patch releases nicotine into the bloodstream to reduce cravings to smoke and releases less and less until the person is no longer addicted.
In this new study, 586 people ages 18-45 are put into three groups at random. Neither the researchers nor the subjects know to which group they belong. One group is given both Zyban and the patch, another is given a placebo Zyban pill and a real patch and the final group is given a real Zyban prescription and a placebo patch. The research subjects start taking their medications immediately and meet with a counselor to set a day to quit, and on that day, the person must quit. Then, the subjects go back to the therapists for follow-ups to see if they really quit.
"In my opinion, the people who take Zyban and use the patch are going to be more likely to quit for good," said McKnight. This study is going to continue for about four years. The researchers hope that once their hypothesis is proven, physicians will be able to prescribe Zyban and the patch together to further improve people's chances of quitting smoking.
In addition to hypnosis and medication, there are multiple options for quitting smoking which can be found on the website, Smokefree.gov.
On average, smoking adults die about 14 years earlier than those who do not.
