Mental health Matters

Written by Fortune Ngubeni

Smoking leads to disease and disability and harms nearly every organ of the body.

• More than 16 million individuals are living with a disease caused by smoking.
• For every person who dies because of smoking, at least 30 people live with a serious smoking-related illness.
• Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
• Smoking also increases risk for tuberculosis, certain eye diseases, and problems of the immune system, including rheumatoid arthritis.
• Smoking is a known cause of erectile dysfunction in males.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death.

• Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year. If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.
• Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the every State including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from second-hand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.
• On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers.
• If smoking continues at the current rate among youth, 5.6 million of today’s youth younger than 18 years of age are expected to die prematurely from a smoking-related illness. This represents about one in every 13th aged 17 years or younger who are alive today.
• Costs and Expenditures
• The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars each year on cigarette and smokeless tobacco advertising and promotions.

• In 2017, 9.36 billion was spent on advertising and promotion of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco combined—more than 25 million every day, and more than 1 million every hour.
• Price discounts to retailers account for 71.7% of all cigarette marketing (about 6.19 billion). These are discounts paid in order to reduce the price of cigarettes to consumers.

Smoking costs the States billions of money each year.

• Total economic cost of smoking is more than 300 billion a year, including
  • Nearly 170 billion in direct medical care for adults
  • More than 156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and exposure to second-hand smoke.

Thousands of young people start smoking cigarettes every day.

• Each day, about 2000 people younger than 18 years smoke their first cigarette.
• Each day, over 300 people younger than 18 years become daily cigarette smokers.

Many adult cigarette smokers want to quit smoking.

• In 2015:
  • Nearly 7 in 10 (68.0%) adult cigarette smokers wanted to stop smoking.
  • More than 5 in 10 (55.4%) adult cigarette smokers had made a quit attempt in the past year.
• Since 2012, the Tips From Former Smokers^® campaign has motivated at least 500,000 tobacco smokers to quit for good.States have billions of money from the taxes they put on tobacco products and money from lawsuits against cigarette companies that they can use to prevent smoking and help smokers quit. Right now, though, the states only use a very small amount of that money to prevent and control tobacco use.

Remember lets be mental alert and raise awareness around lets create an environment that is drug free and user friendly to every one.#Bio cognitive consultants