Reaching the Smokers
Smoking, says a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., is increasingly becoming class-concentrated, with the poorer and less educated far more likely to become or remain smokers than those who have a college education. Writing in the journal on the 25th anniversary of the surgeon general’s first report on the health effects of smoking, researchers report that in 1985 more than 34% of non-high-school graduates were still smokers, compared with little more than 18% of people with college degrees. Dr. Michael C. Fiore, one of the report’s authors, thinks that a major reason for this lopsided ratio may be that most information about smoking’s dangers “has been geared toward people with sophisticated medical knowledge.” The need, he suggests, is to begin refocusing informational efforts to reach the less aware.
What’s unhappily clear is that even the strongest educational program won’t achieve Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s goal of a “smoke-free society” by the end of the century. Each year about 1.3 million Americans quit smoking. But each day about 3,000 take up the habit for the first time. This represents progress of a sort, since between the quitters and those who die from smoking-related diseases--300,000 annually, says the surgeon general--a net reduction does occur. It’s still appalling that 1 million Americans, almost all of them young and an increasing percentage of them female, become new smokers each year.
Warning labels on cigarette packages have been shown to be of almost no deterrent value, and messages about the perils of smoking that are directed at better-educated readers, like this editorial, don’t reach the nost needful audience. The best way to inform the part of the population that so far has been least affected by anti-smoking warnings is probably in the classroom, and early. There was a time, when our society was less affluent and less educated, when elementary schools were the accepted vehicle for providing basic information about personal hygiene. Smoking remains the nation’s primary preventable cause of death and disease. The sooner young people are made aware of that, the better the chances they will say no the enticements of tobacco companies, and so have the chance to lead healthier lives.
