Great news: After France and Italy had smoking bans for respectively 1 and 3 years, the countries had up to 15% less occurrences of heart attacks! Research confirms similiar results in Ireland and Scotland.

I guess the message here is: Stop Smoking and have measurably better heart health in only one year! 

- Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT 

French researchers announced a striking 15% decrease in admissions of patients with myocardial infarction to emergency wards since the public ban on smoking came into effect in restaurants, hotels and casinos in France last January. The announcement was made on 23 February by the National Sanitary Institute.

Similar results were published in Italy on 12 February by the Environmental Health Authority: researchers in Rome found an 11.2 percent reduction of acute coronary events since the January 2005 smoking ban took effect in Italy.

Prof David Thomas, of the European Society of Cardiology and a Senior Cardiologist in the Centre Hospitalier Pitié- Salpêtrière in Paris: "(…) (S)tatistics show the same tendency professionals have already observed in Ireland and Scotland when these countries introduced their own bans on tobacco.

To me, the most striking aspect in this study is the reduction of pollution inside cafés and restaurants by over 35%. Passive smoking has been shown to increase the risk of coronary heart disease and the recent smoking ban is obviously having a beneficial effect on both smokers and non-smokers."

Smoking bans can save lives.

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Both my ‘quotes of the week’ come from Bill Ohlemeyer, vice president and assistant general counsel for Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris. They are taken from Mr. Ohlemeyer’s response to Florida’s Engle lawsuits, and to the 1000s of Floridians who are currently seeking what could be millions of dollars in damage awards.

“We’ve confronted and overcome these types of cases in the past. We have a strategy to defend them.”

And the prizewinner - no doubt:

“Just because people have cancer in their lung, doesn’t mean they have lung cancer. Just because people had cancer in their lung and smoked doesn’t mean smoking caused their cancer.”

I’ll spare you my comments.

- Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

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You can find a lot of information about the alerts and controversy surrounding the quit smoking drug Chantix -or Champix, in Europe- right here on my blog. Just click on the Chantix / Champix button on the navigation menu on the left for an overview.

Luckily, my post today does not report another casualty. It is a scary yet compelling account of a writer’s first-hand experience with the smoking cessation medication.

The following are some paragraphes I selected from Derek De Koff’s powerful article. You can find it in it’s original length in the current issue of ‘New York Magazine’.

- Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

The most unsettling thing about sleeping on Chantix is that I never felt like I was truly asleep. Some part of me remained on guard. It was more like lucid dreaming, what I thought it might feel like to be hypnotized. And it didn’t entirely go away come morning. As I showered, shaved, and scrambled into clothes, I tried to shake a weird, paranoid sense that I’d just been psychically raped by a household appliance. . . .

On January 25, Pfizer was able to share some good news: Japan—where 40.2 percent of all men still smoke—had green-lighted the manufacturing and marketing of its smoking cessation drug. But a few days later, the Chantix news was less cheering. On February 1, the Food and Drug Administration warned that Chantix, which had fourth-quarter sales of $280 million (up from $68 million a year ago), could cause serious psychiatric problems . . .

Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy group, recommends that people not use Chantix—or most new drugs, for that matter—for seven years. “The first seven years are when problems will occur,” says Dr. Sidney Wolfe, editor of Worstpills.org.

“I remember hearing that argument,” Chatterjee said, a few weeks before the FDA’s new warning was issued. “And it’s just so illogical. If no one uses the drug for seven years, there’s no one to report experiences at the end of seven years—so you’re exactly where you were at the beginning.” . . .

It felt as if the essential barrier between reality and my imagination had eroded. Was it because I wasn’t getting enough R.E.M. sleep, so my dream life was rebelling, pouring into daylight, insisting to be attended to, one way or another?

One afternoon, I was typing away at advertising copy, and as I did so, I began to wonder how I had succeeded in fooling myself that my life had any sort of value at all. . . .

I wondered whether Chantix was zapping my brain’s pleasure-delivery system to such a degree that not only did I find no reward in cigarettes, but I also found no reward in socializing, exercising, writing, or any of my usual self-stimulating tricks. . . .

The next morning, I called in sick to work and started cleaning up the considerable mess I’d made. I had to throw out a bunch of broken CDs, smashed glasses, torn clothes, ripped photographs, and the remaining boxes of Chantix from my medicine cabinet.

It was a good call, I think, the second most important decision I’d ever make in my life.

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Everyone knows that smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer. However, few pot smokers realize that they are equally, if not more, at risk for the deadly disease, as cigarette smokers are.

Cannabis contains twice the amount of carcinogens that cigarettes do, it’s smoked without a filter, pot smokers actually hold the smoke in to enhance the effect of the drug (which in turn causes more lung damage), and they usually smoke their joint all the way down to the end…

Here is what researchers of the Medical Reasearch Institute of New Zealand have concluded.

- Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

The researchers found that smoking one joint is equivalent to 20 cigarettes in terms of lung cancer.

While studies in the past have shown that marijuana can cause cancer, few have actually established a strong link between marijuana use and the actual incidence of lung cancer.

For the study, researchers interviewed 79 lung cancer patients in an effort identify the main risk factors for the disease, such as smoking, family history and occupation. The patients were questioned about alcohol and marijuana consumption.

In the high-exposure group, lung cancer risk rose by 5.7 times for patients who smoked more than a joint a day for 10 years, or two joints a day for 5 years, after adjusting for other variables, including cigarette smoking.

"Cannabis smokers end up with five times more carbon monoxide in their bloodstream (than tobacco smokers)," team leader Richard Beasley, at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, said in a news release.

The scientists also noted that marijuana could be expected to harm the airways more than tobacco since its smoke contained twice the level of carcinogens, such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons, compared with tobacco cigarettes.

"There are higher concentrations of carcinogens in cannabis smoke…what is intriguing to us is there is so little work done on cannabis when there is so much done on tobacco,” said Beasley.

"In the near future we may see an ‘epidemic’ of lung cancers connected with this new carcinogen. And the future risk probably applies to many other countries, where increasing use of cannabis among young adults and adolescents is becoming a major public health problem,” he added.

Study results appear in the in the European Respiratory Journal.

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