South Carolina Ignores Dying Nicotine Addicts
Imagine combining all our state's annual deaths from auto accidents, AIDS, breast cancer, fire, liver disease, infant death, murder, suicide, and all illegal and legal drugs, and the total (4,216) not coming close to the number of nicotine addicts who will smoke themselves to death this year (5,992), half during middle-age. Imagine a society that ignores their dying.
CHARLESTON SC - Collectively, S.C. annually spends in excess of a billion
dollars attempting to prevent the 4,216 deaths in the above non-smoking
categories. Sadly, today's state budget does not devote one thin dime toward
helping save any of this year's 6,000 doomed smokers, or to try and prevent the
early demise of the hundreds of thousands of nicotine dependent citizens
lined-up behind them to die.
If true, what does it say about the
priorities of medical and health leadership that fully understand the smoker's
deadly struggle yet knowingly discriminate when it comes to treatment? What does
it say about political conviction that expresses profound concern over any
needless loss of life, liberty or happiness unless the villain is nicotine and
the victim a citizen addicted to smoking it?
What message did our state
send smokers when it took the first $115 million of our $2 billion in tobacco
settlement proceeds - dollars indirectly paid by addicted and dying S.C.
nicotine addicts - and made it an outright gift to our 2,000 nicotine
farmers?
What does it say about the real motives of hospitals across S.C.
that collectively spend untold millions in marketing an image that pretends to
be deeply concerned about preventive community health while turning a blind-eye
to their community's most preventable killer of all?
A persistent cough
is often the first sign of lung cancer. What does it say about thousands of
irresponsible nicotine merchants who smile while taking the coughing smoker's
drug money after hearing them proclaim "Dear God, I wish I could quit!" Why no
moral obligation to help?
It isn't that our smokers don't want to quit.
Annual CDC surveys consistently find that 70% are dying to taste freedom, and
over one-third of S.C. smokers annually muster the confidence for another mad
dash toward it. It's that roughly half of our state's 800,000 adult smokers
won't discover or be taught the secrets to success before their self-destruction
is complete.
The Canadian government's cigarette pack warning label
reads, "Cigarettes are highly addictive." "Studies have shown that tobacco can
be harder to quit than heroin or cocaine." Their government knows that drug
addiction isn't about getting high but about how the brain gets rewired to
define a new sense of normal.
If true, as 2004 approaches, why do we
continue to discriminate by providing illegal drug users effective treatment
while denying effective treatment to those addicted to a legal chemical that
almost all addiction experts agree is harder to arrest and far more deadly?
Why do Philip Morris commercials now fill our screens proclaiming that
nicotine is addictive? For years it asserted that smoking was only habit forming
but not truly addictive like heroin or cocaine. Are they now trying to set the
record straight so as to avoid a flood of addiction warning lawsuits? Are we
listening?
Those who insist on continuing to teach S.C. youth that
smoking is just a "nasty little habit" are playing a deadly contributing role in
helping doom one-quarter of them to a life of permanent chemical captivity.
While 10% of regular alcohol drinkers and 15% of cocaine users will become
chemically dependent, nicotine permanently enslaves the brains of up to 90% of
regular users. But how?
Nicotine is the tobacco plant's natural
protection from being eaten by insects. Drop for drop it's more lethal than
strychnine and three times deadlier than arsenic. Yet, amazingly, by chance,
this natural insecticide's chemical structure is so similar to the
neurotransmitter acetylcholine that once inside the brain it fits a host of
chemical locks permitting it direct and indirect command and control over the
flow of more than 200 neurochemicals, including dopamine, serotonin and
adrenaline.
The brain's defenses do their best to minimize the poison's
impact. In some neuro-circuits the number of receptors available to receive
nicotine are diminished, in others the number of transporters are reduced, and
in still other regions the brain grows millions and millions of extra
acetylcholine receptors, almost as if trying to protect itself by more widely
disbursing the arriving pesticide.
There's only one problem. All the
physical changes engineer a new tailored neurochemical sense of normal built
entirely upon the presence of nicotine. Now, any attempt to stop using it comes
with hurtful anxieties and powerful mood shifts. Returning home now has a price
and a true chemical addiction is born.
The brain's protective
adjustments leave the quitter temporarily desensitized. Their dopamine reward
system will offer-up few rewards, their nervous system will see altering the
status quo as danger and sound emotional anxiety alarms throughout the body, and
mood circuitry will temporarily find it difficult to climb beyond
depression.
Here in Charleston County our drug treatment program is known
as "Charleston Center" and has 125 full-time employees. It is a joint project of
Charleston County and DAODAS and has an annual budget of $10 million.
If
you call the Center and ask if they have a smoking cessation program you'll be
told, "yes but it's only for staff members." If you tell them you have
emphysema, that breathing is getting hard and you beg to participate in it
you'll be told, "we're sorry but it's only for staff members."
The
Center's online budget indicates that it spends an average of $1,665 for each of
the 1,670 persons seen by outpatient services, $3,182 for each of the 121
participants in their recovery and self-sufficiency program, $4,715 for each of
the 171 participants in their opiate treatment program, and $0 dollars to help
zero nicotine addicts, unless you're an addiction center staff member in need of
effective treatment.
"But smokers don't need real drug treatment
programs like the one that recently benefitted Rush Limbaugh," politicians
assert, "they have the nicotine patch, gum and lozenge." Oh, how the estimated
119,840 S.C. families today trying to cope with or survive a host of smoking
induced cancers, C.O.P.D. (emphysema and chronic bronchitis), heart attacks and
strokes wish it were so. The marketing hype surrounding over-the-counter (OTC)
nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products vastly exceeds reality.
A
March 2003 study published in Tobacco Control combined all seven OTC patch and
gum studies and found that 93% of study participants had relapsed to smoking
within six months. Although a well kept pharmaceutical industry secret, NRT's
one year relapse rate is believed to be 96-97%. To make matters worse, we've
known since studies in 1993 and 1995 that the relapse rate for second time or
subsequent nicotine patch users is almost 100%.
But the bad news doesn't
stop there. A just released November study, also published in Tobacco Control,
found that as many as 7% of all gum quitters are still chewing nicotine at six
months and 2% of patch users are still wearing it. That's three months beyond
FDA use recommendations. When combined with the March study the obvious question
becomes, are any gum users nicotine free at six months?
Another dirty
little NRT industry secret revealed in the November study was that 36.6% of
those using the nicotine gum are now classified as chronic long-term users.
There is absolutely no science or logic indicating that high quality
drug treatment programs are effective for illegal drug users but ineffective for
nicotine addicts. To the contrary, many short-term nicotine dependency programs
are today generating six-month recovery rates ranging from 30 to 50% but search
as you might you won't find one here in the Charleston area.
Calls to
the Charleston branch of the American Lung Association, Heart Association and
Cancer Society will all generate similar answers, "no sir, no quitting program
here."
What is the combined price paid statewide to try and reduce or
eliminate our fewer than 100 annual fire deaths? What logic is there in paying
hundreds of millions to protect against the risk of being burned to death by
fire but not one penny when the fire and smoke claiming 6,000 lives annually is
the result of chemical addiction during youth? Why do firefighters campaign to
raise funds for popular health causes while ignoring death by chronic smoke
inhalation?
Almost ninety percent of S.C. smokers became hooked while
children or teens. Is death an average of 5,584 sunrises early the proper
punishment for trying to look more adult during childhood?
Our political
leaders court the nicotine addict's vote, accept and spend their tax dollars on
every important cause but saving them, are now considering a substantial
increase in the nicotine addiction tax without providing any avenue of escape,
and continue ignoring the six thousand annual deaths that they know they have
the ability to help prevent.
Our medical universities, hospitals and
doctors seem almost content to use smokers as well. Most family physicians will
repeatedly treat and accept payment for what they know are smoking induced
respiratory and circulatory ailments while ignoring treatment of the underlying
cause.
What incentive is there for our medical universities and
hospitals to provide free, effective and ongoing treatment programs when they
depend upon smokers to keep so many area cancer, respiratory and cardiac
treatment centers in business, and hospital beds are being filled by bodies
riddled by emphysema, cancer, heart attack or stroke?
The concepts of
smoker fault and just punishment become apparent when we reflect upon the degree
of public concern, public funding and literature devoted to detection and early
screening for breast cancer, when lung cancer is a bigger annual killer of S.C.
women.
Where is the lung cancer screening message or help in defeating
its primary root cause? Is the disparity of concern and funding associated with
the fact that politicians know that 87% of lung cancers are caused by smoking,
while women with breast cancer are seen as innocent victims?
Is South
Carolina at the very bottom of the barrel in almost all national health
categories by chance, design, ignorance, a lack of political will, or because of
ineffective leadership within the medical community?
When will the creed
"first do no harm" cause physicians to stop ignoring and begin treating a
powerful dependency that is slowly killing so many of their patients? When will
politicians begin taking their constitutional oath to protect the public health
seriously? How many more must die before we begin loving all neighbors equally,
even those who became chemical slaves during childhood?
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/11/prweb91430.htm