Tag Archives: Smoking

Lung cancer, Surgeon General, Tobacco, Uncategorized

Surgeon General new report on smoking … cigarettes are bad, M’kay

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OK, what has gotten a lot of press from a truly extensive Surgeon General’s report on cigarettes released yesterday is a conclusion that “there is no safe level of cigarette smoke.”

The media has turned this into “just one cigarette can kill you.” Unfortunately, the report does contain a passage that just a few minutes of cigarette smoke can give a person with heart disease a heart attack. Well, having someone sneak up on you from behind and say, “Boo!” can give you a heart attack if you have serious heart disease. It’s a really stupid point.

The real crux of the report, which the media has missed somewhat, is that it examines how cigarettes cause various forms of cancer and lung disease.
In summary:
• The chemicals and toxicants in tobacco smoke damage DNA, which can lead to cancer. Nearly one-third of all cancer deaths every year are directly linked to smoking. Smoking causes about 85% of lung cancers in the U.S.
•Exposure to tobacco smoke quickly damages blood vessels throughout the body and makes blood more likely to clot. This damage can cause heart attacks, strokes, and even sudden death.
• The chemicals in tobacco smoke inflame the delicate lining of the lungs and can cause permanent damage that reduces the ability of the lungs to exchange air efficiently and leads to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

I found the lung cancer chapter the most interesting. Sure enough, here is the conclusion I was looking for:

“There is consistent evidence that a combination of polymorphisms in the CYP1A1 and GSTM1 genes leads to higher DNA adduct levels in smokers and higher relative risks for lung cancer than in those smokers without this genetic profile.
“Exposure to cigarette smoke carcinogens leads to DNA damage and subsequent mutations in TP53 and KRAS in lung cancer.”

So, here’s the thing to wrap your heads around. Smoking fucks with your DNA. It isn’t just irritating the cells of your lungs, it’s actually changing the DNA of those cells.

The various cancers mentioned by the report were lung, mouth, throat, stomach, pancreas, bladder, kidney and leukemia. Surprisingly, lymphoma was not mentioned. I had always thought there was an increased risk of lymphoma if you smoked, but this report doesn’t mention that, so I suppose not.

One of the things that has long baffled scientists is why most smokers don’t get lung cancer. Somewhere between 10 to 20 percent do, depending on what study you read. Why don’t the 80 or other 90 percent get lung cancer is smoking is carcinogenic?

The answer apparently is in genetics, which the report refers to above, and I was hoping it would talk about that. People with a certain gene are more prone to lung cancer. If they smoke and have this gene, they are at extreme risk of lung cancer. If they don’t smoke, they are still at elevated risk of lung cancer. That’s why 10 percent of men who get lung cancer aren’t smokers, and 20 percent of women. Perhaps there are other environmental factors, such as radon or air pollution. But, the fact remains, that roughly 85 percent of the people who get lung cancer are smokers.

So, if you don’t have this gene and smoke, you will probably never get lung cancer. You may die in your 50s of heart disease or die from COPD or some other form of cancer, but you probably won’t get lung cancer. So, you’re not somehow magically out of the woods if you don’t have this gene. It isn’t that simple.
Anyway, here is the press release on this report. You can download the whole 700-page document if you wish. Or you can just download the executive summary.

Tobacco

South Dakota approves smoking ban; the South remains the ashtray of the United States

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First on the docket is a month-old story from South Dakota (we gots some catching up to do). In South Dakota, the State Legislature passed a smoking ban a couple of years ago. Bar and casino owners passed around a petition to put the issue to a public vote. That petition went to court and it appeared would be overturned because it came out something like 13 valid signatures short.

Well, the judge wasn’t going to stop the ballot measure over 13 lousy signatures, so he approved the ballot measure, putting the smoking ban on hold for a year. I’m not wild about any tobacco measure being put on the ballot because the industry has a history of defeating measures at the ballot box by pouring millions into state elections (Read: Oregon, California cigarette tax increases).

On Nov. 2 (toldja I’m in catch-up mode), South Dakota voters approved the ballot measure with 64 percent of the vote, one of the widest margins I’ve ever seen. Similar measures in Ohio, Nevada and Arizona all passed with less than 60 percent of the vote. At least one restaurant is already reporting that their business has gone up since the smoking ban went into effect.

So, I haven’t checked this map in a while, but it now appears that 29 states have “strong” smoking bans (bars and restaurants), and 38 states have some form of smoking ban (at least restuarants.)

This map is helpful. Even in those black states, most major cities have smoking bans. The last I checked, San Antonio, Texas, is the biggest city in the country with no smoking ban.


What do those black states mostly have in common? They are all Republican-controlled states. Republicans hate rules and regulations, except of course when it comes to gays and women wanting control over their own bodies.

When I first started blogging about this, probably fewer than a dozen states had smoking bans. How far we’ve come.

Uncategorized

Pepe’s Non Smoking Party Lounge explained

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Well, it’s the tentative return of Pepe’s Non-Smoking Party Lounge, where we talk about smoking, tobacco, cigarettes, pot, health, lung disease and whatever else pops into the scrambled eggs of our minds.

One thing that will be different from the previous incarnation of The Lounge is I won’t be talking about Facebook stuff; there won’t be much personal information and I won’t be discussing local politics. That’s what Facebook is for. So, “Confederate” from Kentucky, you won’t find out much useful information about me here.

Here’s my agenda in a nutshell. I lost my dad to lung cancer when I was 16. He smoked four packs a day and was 49 when he died. He smoked the day that he died, hooked up to an oxygen tank. Later that day, he drowned in his own bodily fluids.

My mom has had cancer, a heart attack and for the past several years has suffered from COPD. She gets pneumonia and bronchitis every winter. COPD is almost exclusively caused by smoking. She has smoked as much as two packs a day. I figure between my mom and my dad, they have probably smoked considerably more than 1 million cigarettes in their lifetimes. To learn more about COPD, click here.

I grew up exposed to as much as six packs a day of other people’s (mostly my parents) cigarette smoke. I estimate that I ingested the equivalent of 25,000 cigarettes by the time I turned 16. I had constant ear infections, had to have three surgeries to combat the ear infections, and to this day have trouble with my ears. I grew up with chronic bronchitis which later evolved into a kind of asthma. I got pleurisy one year and pneumonia twice. Eventually, it cleared up. I haven’t had a single bout of bronchitis in probably 15 years and now I climb mountains for a hobby.

So, a few years ago, after watching my mom pawing through her luggage, desperate for a cigarette after being hospitalized for a heart attack, then begging me to stop at a store to buy her cigs as I drove her home from the hospital, then after getting word three months later she was back in the hospital with pneumonia, I decided to get more involved in anti-tobacco issues and start up an anti-tobacco blog. The blog did all right, but my readership never really got beyond the teens. I’m hopeful with more “pings” and more Internet contacts and more knowledge of how to build up readership, it will get a few more readers.

We’ll see. This will be a work in progress and I really am an neophyte with WordPress, so bear with me.