New: What Happens to Your Body If You Stop Smoking Right Now? – Part 2

This is the second in a series of posts by Bill from California, a Blisstree reader, former smoker, and active member of our passionate community of commenters. Read Bill’s first post here, where you’ll also find Blisstree’s original smoking post by Liz Lewis.

Am I a Former Smoker? Part 2

Bias and Activism In the Public Health Community

I’ve been put off by the aggressive efforts from the more extreme elements of the public health community. Though my own field is very different, I’m close to this subject because my wife is a researcher on public health issues. (I hasten to add that she’s not among the radicals I’m targeting here.)

In my opinion, the worst of these efforts are biased and even propagandistic. They’re a clear violation of basic scientific principles and values (perhaps pseudo-science is a more appropriate term for it), because they imply using fear to manipulate individuals into a desired way of thinking. I wanted to understand the motives that lay behind such a corruption of scientific values.

I freely admit that I despise the people who do this; conversely, I admire those who seek to put their own strongly held views aside and strive for objectivity. What follows are some good examples of both with names, and some random observations that you can evaluate as you wish.

Before launching my own (latest and so far successful) quit, I visited some websites devoted to quitting smoking. There are so many useless ones! Here are three that I found interesting and useful. They illustrate the strikingly different ways that smokers who want to quit are seen by public health professionals. The first offers simple, straightforward support by way of short videos and essays. The second addresses the effectiveness of many of the quit smoking products, and the third reveals the entrenched attitudes of some of the more radical no-smoking advocates and what it is they really
seek.

• Joel Spitzer

Generally, Why Quit is a useful site you can trust (founded and edited by John Polito, based on the smoking cessation work of Joel Spitzer). But keep in mind that one needs to be critical when browsing Spitzer’s documents and videos. For example, one of Spitzer’s documents asserts that addiction to smoking is a disease, perhaps even a form of mental illness. That’s poppycock, of course. But that curious document is an exception to the rule of this site: He has posted many videos that are engaging, funny, and helpful. The fundamental principle underlying everything on this site is the idea that you must quit cold turkey. The mantra is: “Never take another puff.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage a perfect cold turkey quit – the result being that even though I learned from Spitzer’s site, his method failed for me. I’ve no doubt that it can work for others, however, and surely this is a site that deserves your attention. Spitzer has obviously put a great deal of thought, time, and effort into it; he seems to have no hidden agenda; and in particular, he makes no money from the documents/books that are offered up for downloading.

• Scott Leischow, Ph.D.

Scott Leischow is a prominent public health professional – a professor in  both colleges of medicine and public health at the University of Arizona. I include him because in this particular 50-minute video, he discusses results of clinical trials of various Nicotine Replacement Therapies (gum, zyban, patches, etc.). These NRT devices all deliver nicotine to the body as cigarettes do, but by different routes that do not involve the lungs. They have no long-term effect on nicotine addition, and presumably, the issue is whether by avoiding the lungs and ingesting these products in a controlled way, they can help smokers on a program of quitting.

His lecture begins after an excruciatingly long-winded introduction by an administrator. About 15-20 minutes into the lecture itself, you will hear professor Leischow say, quite unequivocally, that in the “real world”, nicotine replacement therapies do not work! He goes on to say that some of the newer products – such as Champix, which works directly on the neurotransmitters of your brain – seem to be promising, but have not yet had sufficient clinical trials to rigorously establish their effectiveness.

• Stanton Glantz, Ph.D.

Though we don’t know each other personally, Stanton Glantz and I are in some sense colleagues. (He’s on the faculty of the medical school of UCSF, while I’m in a science department of UC Berkeley.) However, on public health issues concerning smoking, we are polar opposites. So while I have an obligation to try to be even-handed with what I say about him, I also have a duty to criticize more sharply than I normally would. I do not intend this as a personal attack, but rather an alert for the unwary: Professor Glantz is an idealogue who follows his advocacy, and smokers should view his positions as those of an adversary – with caution if not suspicion. He’s certainly not our friend – having little or no compassion for smokers – even smokers who are searching for a way to quit. I have the impression that he sees himself as a champion of virtue (Off with their heads, Hallelujah!), with ends justifying means – brimming over with hubris. On a subconscious level he scares me – as do all zealots who are not simply fools.

I emphasize that Glantz is a prominent anti-smoking activist who has been effective in actions against the tobacco industry (which is laudable). He is also a leader in the movement to curtail smoking cigarettes by anyone, anywhere – and I suspect that what he wants is the complete elimination of  smoking cigarettes (not so laudable, in my opinion). It’s even conceivable to me that what he really wants is to criminalize smoking cigarettes – just like illegal narcotics. Certainly it’s no secret that elimination of smoking is the Holy Grail to extreme anti-smoking activists like Glantz. Never mind the lessons learned from prohibition, the backyard stills, the bad booze, and Al Capone.

Several years ago I attended a dinner on the UC Berkeley campus for which Glantz was featured speaker. He was proselytizing about the dangers of secondhand smoke. One of the main points of his talk was to promote fear of “free” cigarette smoke as a carcinogen even when diluted by orders of magnitude from its presence in inhaled cigarette smoke. I recall that he made the point in the following way: “If someone across the room lights a cigarette right now, I will begin to smell it in less than a minute.” The point being, I suppose, that if you can smell it, it might be enough kill you. I remember thinking that if I were to light the log in the room’s fireplace, in short order everyone in the room would smell it and be exposed to all those impurities and carcinogens in the flames of the burning log. But wouldn’t most of us enjoy smelling that log burn, and how many of us are put at risk by smelling burning logs?

To be sure, this was a red herring, and I was annoyed. I remember taking out my pack of cigarettes and putting it on the table in front of me, thinking how much fun it would be to light up and test his hypothesis. Alas, lighting the thing would have created a ruckus, and ruined what had been a pleasant enough evening before professor Glantz began his indoctrination. So I didn’t.

He took questions after his lecture, and I asked: “You’ve advocated huge increases in taxes on cigarettes. This will impact people with little money significantly more than the rest of us. Does it concern you that the poorest people will be among the most impacted?” I don’t recall the details of his response, but I do recall that it was disturbing to learn that this was not something that particularly concerned Professor Glantz.

Check back soon for the third part of Bill’s post, coming soon to Blisstree!