Smoking – a killer to be reckoned with

One smoker in every two will die as a result of smoking! The figure isn’t new but it has taken on a certain resonance in the light of the results of a 30-year-long Norwegian study. Half the smokers in this study who regularly consumed a packet of cigarettes a day died from smoking-related causes.

This is a wide-ranging study as it involved over 54,000 Norwegians out of a population of only 4.7 million. And the very least one can say is that smoking really is a killer. Over the 30 years of the study, around 50% of the men who were heavy smokers died, compared with only 18% among non-smokers. The results among women are comparable, with 33% of deaths among the smokers, compared with only 13% among the non-smokers.

According to researchers at the University of Oslo, more than two men in every three of those who smoked died or fell victim to cardiovascular disease. This is still a higher percentage than among women, where these diseases “only” account for 50% of morbimortality. However, with changes in social behaviour, these percentages could draw closer.

Getting smokers to quit littering

It's one of those things so mundane and commonplace, most of us probably don't even notice when it happens, let alone get worked up over it.I was driving on the 10 Freeway and watching as the driver ahead of me and his passenger casually flicked cigarette ashes out their windows as they chatted. Then, as they finished their smokes, first one and then the other tossed their butts onto the road.
This town is a lot of things. One thing it's not is an ashtray. But this got me wondering: How many  cigarette butts get littered every year, and what does that do to the environment?

And what can we do about it?
"For people who smoke, tossing a butt on the ground is part of the whole ritual," said Thomas Novotny, a professor of epidemiology at UC San Francisco who focuses on cigarette butts. "It's not considered litter."
In fact, cigarette butts are among the most common forms of litter nationwide. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works estimates that local smokers drop 600,000 butts on the ground every month, or more than 7 million a year.
"By a mile, the No. 1 item that we find at beach cleanups is cigarette butts," said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, a Southern California environmental advocacy group.
According to Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit group that compiles statistics from thousands of community cleanups nationwide, cigarette butts account for about a third of all litter in the United States.
In urban areas, the group says, cigarette butts represent as much as half of all litter on streets and sidewalks.
Put another way, the nearly 370 billion filtered cigarettes smoked in the U.S. each year result in about 135 million pounds of butts littering the landscape. Worldwide, the more than 5 trillion cigarettes consumed annually create more than 2 billion pounds of butts.
"It's a form of blight," said UCSF's Novotny.
Butts are also a long-term and potentially hazardous pollutant. Cigarette filters are made primarily of a plastic-like material called cellulose acetate. Contrary to what some smokers may believe, this material isn't biodegradable. Rather, cigarette filters gradually break down over as much as a dozen years into smaller particles that remain in the environment.
According to Novotny, the typical cigarette butt contains nicotine, arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, acetone and vinyl chloride.