Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

The U.S. military’s long, storied love affair with tobacco may be doomed.

The Pentagon, which actively promoted smoking during the two world wars and still subsidizes tobacco at PXs and commissaries, is considering a ban.

Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

That’s one recommendation from a panel led by a former dean of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill that was asked by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs how to reduce tobacco use in the military.

If Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accepts the group’s suggestions, it would be a historic about-face for the likes of Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, where tens of thousands of young men and women learned to smoke amid a culture that regarded cigarettes as much a part of being a soldier or Marine as carrying a rifle.

“It’s all I see on the bases,” said Staff Sgt. Maritza Hunt, a squad leader at Fort Bragg.

Hunt, although not a smoker, was skeptical of how successful efforts to curb tobacco use would be.

“You have colonels and generals and all kinds of people who smoke,” she said.

The military could end tobacco use within 20 years by gradually refusing entry to users, said Stuart Bondurant, dean emeritus of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“If the services take the full 20 years, practically everyone now in the military would be retired,” he said.

The panel that Bondurant led issued a report in June that found that 22 percent of VA patients and 33 percent of active-duty troops use tobacco, compared with 20 percent of the U.S. population. Use is even higher among deployed troops.

Learn how to Quit Smoking

“I constantly struggle with it [smoking]. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes.”

– President Obama, June 23, 2009

Learn How To Quit Smoking

I started smoking when I was 16, pilfering cigarettes from my mother’s purse or swiping unfiltered Pall Malls whenever my dad left his opened pack untended. Then I got a job that summer and began buying my own — Newports with menthol and filters, a brand preferred by all the young tobacco initiates I had begun to share my habit with.

The rituals of smoking were many, and we adopted them all, along with the identity they gave us, the new sense of ourselves as grown-ups, even if we were faking it, aping our elders as a means of proclaiming our difference from them — a neat trick.

We’d all strike poses learned from the movies, or practice smooth moves in the art of lighting up. We studied how to flip away a cigarette butt in a gesture of defiant insouciance, or how to cup a cigarette against the wind. We learned how to light one cigarette from another, or to light one from a gas stove without singeing our hair. We taught ourselves how to blow smoke rings.

Some of us made a fashion statement by enfolding a cigarette pack in the sleeve of a T-shirt, and others thought it a mark of adolescent elegance to cock a cigarette behind one’s ear.

We also picked up courting practices that included the touch of a hand as we lighted cigarettes for our girlfriends. We attempted to look sensitive in the way we pulled smoke into our lungs ever so contemplatively, then exhaling slowly, desperately trying to impress.

Those first cigarettes I smoked would lead to a couple hundred thousand more, consumed over more than 30 years, long after any of it seemed cool, and much past the time when smoking was a choice. What began as a desire for acceptance and admission to adulthood became the mark of a pariah, bearing the stamp of loserdom, as smokers huddled near the entrances to our workplaces. We’d take quick drags on our illicit smokes while colleagues exited and entered the buildings with looks of disdain or beleaguered tolerance for our pathetic need.

The arc of American tobacco addiction began during World War I, when doughboys fresh off the farms were given tobacco and rolling papers as part of their ration kits, an explicit government endorsement of a practice that I’m sure killed more of those young soldiers than enemy bullets ever would. My grandfather picked up the habit in uniform and passed it down to me — as did guys such as Humphrey Bogart and a legion of other actors and writers of my granddad’s generation who enshrined the practice as the hallmark of toughness or sophistication.

Women were taught to smoke largely as a means of weight control (perhaps that benefit is why our president is so elegantly slim). Thousands of ads from the 1920s through the ’50s promised glamour and trim silhouettes to our grandmothers and mothers. Those ads helped persuade my mom to start smoking before she conceived me when she was 16, by which time she was already a nicotine addict. Even doctors joined in the campaign to get women to smoke, endorsing some brands over others and promising menstrual mood control and suppression of “nerves.”

The social pressure to start smoking is less today than it was in Mom’s day — or mine — but, every day, 3,500 Americans under 18 try their first cigarette, and 1,100 make it a habit, according to the American Cancer Society. Some are enticed by flavorings designed to attract the young. The tobacco bill passed last month bans most flavorings, though a political compromise exempted the one — menthol — that helped hook me. But overall, giving the federal government new powers to regulate tobacco is a good thing, likely to save lives.

Mark Twain famously said that quitting smoking was easy, that he’d “done it hundreds of times.” I found it equally “easy,” swearing off cancer sticks on an almost daily basis until I finally managed to smoke my last cigarette 15 years ago.

My mother quit a few months ago. It was “easy” for her too. She has lung cancer.

Anti Smoking Drugs Linked to Increase in Mental Side Effects

Two prescription drugs that are used to quit smoking have been linked to an increase in mental side effects. The mood changes are prevalent and the FDA has instructed manufacturers of both Chantix (Varenicline) and Zyban (Bupropion) to place boxed warning labels on the packaging inserts and prescription drug information. Some of the changes in mood or mental side effects experienced include:

Depression
Anger or Hostility
Behavioral Changes
Suicidal Thoughts or thoughts of dying

The mental or mood disorders were determined through the use of the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System or AERS. Both consumers and health care professionals can use AERS to submit reports of adverse reactions to medications to the FDA. The tool helps identify reactions that were not identified during clinical trials or studies, but might have been identified after a medication has been approved for general use. Consumers can fill out forms for the AERS program with their health care provider, or they can submit their own reports through MedWatch.

After receiving multiple reports submitted by consumers and health care providers, the FDA has determined that the warning must be placed on both Chantix and Zyban. Zyban, or Bupropion, is also marketed as the anti-depressant drug, Wellbutrin. Patients using Wellbutrin have also experienced similar mood changes and found their mental disorders increased. Wellbutrin will also receive the boxed warning label. Generic versions of the drug will also receive the box warnings.

The new warnings will be in ‘boxed’ form. This means that the paper inserts that accompany the medication will have a black box with the warning information listed. Those using Chantix or Zyban should report any changes in mood or their mental well-being to their health care provider immediately.

In addition to the box warning, manufacturers of smoking cessation products will need to conduct clinical trials to determine how frequently the mental disorders, or neuropsychiatric symptoms occur. They will also need to determine whether the symptoms are more prone to occurring in patients with a previous history of mental disorders. Pfizer Inc manufacturers Chantix and GlaxoSmithKilne manufacturers Zyban.

Greek’s new law restricts public smoking

Europe’s most nicotine-dependent nation adopt a new public smoking ban Wednesday, launching a stub out of the Greek custom of lighting up virtually everywhere. Exceptions were made for mentally ill and players.

Greek's new law restricts public smoking

Unrestricted indoor smoking in restaurants, bars, cafes and workplaces is now against the law, the third is trying to impose prohibition Greece over the last decade.

“We want to change the minds of many years and adjust our daily habits … to the current practice in all civilized countries,” Health Minister Dimitris AVRAMOPOULOS said. “Greek society is prepared for that.”

EU figures show that 37.6 percent of Greeks aged over 15 smoke on a daily basis – the highest level in the EU-27 nation. According to the Ministry of Health, the habit kills 20,000 Greek smokers every year, and another 700 die as a result of passive smoking.

But the government has stopped shy of imposing a total ban, and critics say it will do with the new law as ineffective as the previous two – which were generally ignored by smokers and related entities.

Small establishments will be able to choose whether they will be smoking or nonsmoking only, and may cancel more smoking areas.

And all hospitals and health facilities will be smoke free – in addition to the mental institution where the patient will be able to smoke on prescription “for purely curative,” according to the new law.

Offenders will face fines that vary euro50 smoking for up euro20,000 for owners of bars, restaurants and cafes caught for various infractions.

A poll earlier this year found that 95 percent of nonsmokers and 62 percent of smokers support a public smoking ban.

“It is a positive step,” said kiosk Athens Pavlos Giannopoulos work. “It’s all a matter of habit, since that (the law) is enforced.”

Obama, the first president to smoke cigarettes

Yes, President Obama says, he occasionally sneaks a cigarette.

Obama Smoking Cigarette

This is, perhaps, one of the worst-kept secret around the White House. Weeks, the president of the advisers have declined to say whether he whipped his smoking. And one day after signing the landmark tobacco legislation, Mr. Obama conceded as many have surmised.

“If I fell from the train sometimes Yes,” said Mr. Obama on Tuesday, White House news conference. “Am I a smoker a day, a constant smoker? No.”

Between denouncing the crackdown on protests in Iran and explaining his health care plan in Congress, Mr. Obama was asked whether he still smoked. Expression on his face – a dismissive of, some of the bother – foretold his answer.

“I do not do it in front of my children,” he said. “I do not do it in front of my family. I would say that I am 95 percent cured, but there are times where I mess up.”

Mr. Obama, of course, is hardly the first president to smoke cigarettes. But, this is a new era, when tobacco was banned, the improvement of health care is at the top of the president’s agenda and tough anti-tobacco legislation is passed his table.

“First of all, the new law was put into place is not for me,” said Mr. Obama, speaking tersely to a reporter who asked the question, Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers. “It’s about the next generation of kids is published.”

Mr. Obama’s answer May did little to add to public debate about smoking, but he illustrates his testiness on the subject. His wife, Michelle, told him to stop when he started his campaign, saying: “He can not be President of smoking.”

But now, it seems, he is – at least occasionally.

I make this question one every month or so, “said Mr. Obama.” You know, I do not know what to say to you, except the fact that you know, like people who go to AA, you know, once you’ve gone down this time, then you know that is something I constantly struggle with. “

Mr. Obama is not seen smoking in public for years. In 2005, on his first day in Washington as a freshman senator, he has removed a number of the window as the SUV and lit up cigarettes as they rode on Capitol Hill in a meeting at the White House. And now that he lives in the White House, the testing is far greater.

So where is he smoking? Wooded grove White House around the swimming pool and tennis courts is one place, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who are not authorized to speak about it.