Success in Tobacco Cessation Support

I've brought it up some time before, but I thought that I would mention my work with tobacco cessation efforts again. Before I go any further, here are some numbers from the CDC:

Cigarette smoking causes about 1 of every 5 deaths in the United States each year. Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause the following:

• 443,000 deaths annually (including deaths from secondhand smoke)
• 49,400 deaths per year from secondhand smoke exposure
• 269,655 deaths annually among men
• 173,940 deaths annually among women

Cigarette use causes premature death:

• On average, adults who smoke cigarettes die 14 years earlier than nonsmokers.
• Based on current cigarette smoking patterns, an estimated 25 million Americans who are alive today will die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses, including 5 million people younger than 18 years of age.

Yesterday we met with our weekly Tobacco Cessation Support Group - the only one available in the entire of Clark County, by the way - and we talked about how much money our patients have spent on cigarettes over the years, and how much money the tobacco companies have made off of this nasty addiction. One of our patient estimated that throughout his 43 years of smoking 1-3 packs a day he has spend over $313,000 on tobacco products (the class average was around $96,822). That's equivalent to a full price of a 3-4 bedroom house in Vancouver, WA. At current prices. Now, think about the 443,000 people (that's half the population of Portland, OR, by the way) who died from tobacco related illnesses every year - if each of them spent even a half of what this patient has on tobacco products, the tobacco companies have made themselves a nice chunk of change, don't you think? Let's say, $100,000 per person, times 443,000 people = $443,000,000 just from this year's folks. And, if they smoked more than that, $313,000 x 443,000 = $138,659,000,000 That's TRILLIONS of dollars! Just from one year's crop of smokers. It's incredible, and rightfully so it made our class participants rather mad. So, hopefully they'll take that anger and do something about it - more people need to know that there are folks out there making a huge profit from your bad health.

On a cheerier note, our clinic's Tobacco Cessation Efforts have not gone unnoticed. Over the last 9 months we have developed the only free Tobacco Cessation Classes and Support Groups in the whole county. We have been recognized by the Washington State Tobacco Cessation Resource Center as Tobacco Cessation Champions. We have referred over 350 patients to the Washington State Quit Line Services, which actually came out to over 30% of all Quit Line referrals in the entire state of Washington. That's something to be proud of. Hopefully we can spread the word even more, and get more people to kick their nicotine addiction once and for all.