What do we know?

What if I told you that if you jumped off a cliff, three hundred feet high on to rocks below, you would have a 1 in 5 chance of dying and a 1 in 3 chance of getting hurt? Would you jump? The odds are in your favor. I’ll bet you wouldn’t (and this is from a woman who got kicked out of Vegas). I’ll bet you would say the odds aren’t good enough. Well, if you smoke more than 10-15 cigarettes per day for a few years, those are your odds. And they get worse the longer you smoke. I know, you’re saying, “please those odds are for jumping off a cliff once—I only smoke a few cigarettes for a little while, it’s not the same”. Right you are! But how many people only smoke a “few cigarettes for a little while”? And what’s a little while anyway. A month? A year? How many people do you know who smoked a few cigarettes for only a year. In fact smoking 5-10 cigarettes per day for five years increases your risk of dying or injury (lung disease, heart disease) by 10%. Smoke 10-15 cigarettes per day and it increases to 20%. Oh, but who smokes half a pack? Smoke a pack of cigarettes per day for five years and your risk of death or injury increase to 30%.  My best friend and dentist smoked a pack a day for 25 years and had a heart attack at 48. She’s on beta blockers for life now. How you like those odds?

Maybe cigarette manufacturers should include this on their pages. WARNING—this product, if used as directed, may kill you or cause you permanent disability due to lung cancer and heart disease. OK, ladies? If you’re a smoker, even if you don’t smoke while pregnant and who would, you significantly up the odds of a low birth weight baby. Now I ask you, what did the baby do to deserve this? But this can be avoided because guys, if you’re a regular smoker your sperm count could be below the amount required to conceive. If you can even get to that point: smoking has been linked to erectile dysfunction in men under 40.

So what would happen if we smokers could all stop smoking? Each year 10,000 lives would be saved. That’s thousands of grandmothers and grandfathers, hundreds of mothers/aunts and fathers/uncles and children who would have their parents around to babysit when they want to go out on a date. And, perhaps, they could make the baby that not smoking would allow them to. And don’t even think if you’ve been smoking a long time it doesn’t matter if you quit. It certainly does. According to the Surgeon General, if you’ve smoked a pack a day for 20 years and stop, then in nine months, the cilia in your lungs will regenerate, allowing your body to clean your lungs and reduce infection. One year after quitting, your risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker. Five years after quitting, your risk of stroke is reduced to that of a nonsmoker. Ten years after quitting, your chances of developing the lung cancer are about half that of someone who continues to smoke. Fifteen years after quitting, your risk of coronary heart disease is equal to that of a nonsmoker and your lungs will look like the lungs of someone who never smoked. Those are odds you can live with.

Tobacco is one of the most addictive substances available today. Certainly it’s the most addictive legal substance. It’s hard to quit. No, it’s really, really hard to quit. But if you truly believed the odds I mentioned earlier—if God told you those were the odds, wouldn’t you at least try to quit? Quitting smoking may be the toughest thing you’ll ever do. But doing so increases your chances of living into old age, working productively, being around to watch your grandchildren grow and being glad you don’t have emphysema, heart disease or lung cancer. If you could swing the odds in your favor why wouldn’t you? That’s what I did in Vegas counting cards at Black Jack. OK, so the big guys caught on eventually but I left with my winnings. You know that old saying “quit while you’re ahead”?  In the Vegas world of smoking, quit while you have your health.

For more information on how to quit, go to the American Cancer Society’s web page at http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_10_13X_Guide_for_Quitting_Smoking.asp or log in to http://www.naquitline.org to find a quitline in your state.

Linda Blount
National Vice President, Health Disparities
The American Cancer Society