Health Officials Increasingly Contemplate End Of Smoking

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ATLANTA (AP) — Health officials have begun to predict the end of cigarette smoking in America. They have long wished for a cigarette-free America, but shied away from calling for smoking rates to fall to zero or near zero by any particular year. The power of tobacco companies and popularity of their products made such a goal seem like a pipe dream.

But a confluence of changes has recently prompted public health leaders to start throwing around phrases like "endgame" and "tobacco-free generation." Now, they talk about the slowly-declining adult smoking rate dropping to 10 percent in the next decade and to 5 percent or lower by 2050.

Acting U.S. Surgeon General Boris Lushniak last month released a 980-page report on smoking that pushed for stepped-up tobacco-control measures. His news conference was an unusually animated showing of anti-smoking bravado, with Lushniak nearly yelling, repeatedly, "Enough is enough!"

Polls show that cigarette smoking is no longer considered normal behavior, and is now less popular among teens than marijuana.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/09/end-smoking_n_4757216.html

Speed the process up by doubling the taxes. Smoking, like the lottery, is a scourge on people who can't afford it.

[Glitterati]

1. And, on Chris Hayes last week

the entire panel was discussing how they could take the smoking lessons to all the other habits they abhor.

Is your pet habit next?

HAYES: We`re back and joining me now, Heather McGee and Sam Seder. I
don`t think that we think enough about as progressives, just a tremendous
success that has been the decline in the smoking rate. It`s a progressive
success story. You had big business trying to muddy the waters on science,
as documented in a great book. The parallels between climate science and
tobacco science! You had libertarians saying you`re a nanny state, and
then you had this cultural message that got sent. And all those things
came together, I wonder what else do you think like guns, for instance, is
that the solution for guns?

SAM SEDER, HOST, "MAJORITY REPORT": I think there`s potentially the
solution with guns. I think it can work in terms of climate change as
well. We see it. I think in the context of climate change, one of the
studies shows you are five times more likely to quit smoking if you do not
like the tobacco companies. Three to five times less likely to start
smoking if you do not like the tobacco companies. We see organizations
going around and starting to do a divestment program at colleges across the
country and to say these carbon energy companies are poisoning us and
that`s an externality of our profit making.

HEATHER MCGHEE, DEMOS: Another piece of it that has to happen, though, is
the tobacco where it got more expensive, it has to become more expensive to
use the --

HAYES: It`s not just moral inflation?

MCGHEE: It got easier to quit. All of the things around smoke free
workplaces and all that, doctors not smoking in your face when you came
into the talking about cessation, it is easier to conserve.

HAYES: That`s a really good point. There`s real effort being done to say,
coal particularly, of all the fossil fuels is like the tobacco. But yes,
you also need to have the alternatives, you need to have availability of
green energy, technologies like that in order to do the cross process.
This chart tells an interesting story. Percentage of cigarette smokers
drop e dropped 34.8 percent to 18 percent. Gun related deaths in the same
period of time up and up and up.

SEDER: Your guest talked about litigation and that was a big part of the
cascade --

HAYES: Let`s remember, a lot of this stuff that was the smoking gun
evidence, the fact that they were covering up the science came from
science, litigation.

SEDER: That`s where the trial lawyers fill that vacuum, you`re going to
see where government action is commuted because of the lobby, we see this
in the context of guns, it is one thing to say we have the right to bear
arms; it`s another to say we have statutory protection from liability from
the product they sell. That is a big problem, because if gun manufacturers
can just produce whatever they want it`s one thing to own it, you don`t
have do put safety mechanisms on it is another.

MCGHEE: The fact that there are no consumer protections and there`s a
statutory bar on being able to use them. They`re killing their users that
are what`s so nuts about for the people that are gun owners of America.
You can`t even sue on their behalf. I think if you think about Wal-Mart
stopping selling guns, that`s basically what --

HAYES: Right, right.

MCGHEE: I don`t know how many of billions of dollars a year Wall-mart
would have to leave off the table. That is the goal.

HAYES: There`s also this I think there`s a very interesting cultural
aspect of this, in 2004 there`s a Hollywood mandate on smoking in youth
related films. No principle character can be seen to smoke in a film
taking place during contemporary times and be rated g, PG or PG-13. That
was incredibly effective.

MCGHEE: Culture is so important, one of the places that as progressives
and activists, there are very few fields that do that well. The other
thing that`s important to remember about smoking is that elite smoke died
from smoking, lost their partners and spouses to smoking. And that class
difference actually, when you have studio execs writing the rules, it
touched them directly.

HAYES: They were able to -- they were forced to be made to see that there
was a direct connection, right? The thing I think about, there was denial
for a long time that the science is junk. That had to be overcome by hook,
by crook. It`s been an incredible battle for a long time. Thank you both.