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Jul

2011

Will Smokers React to Scare Tactics Like Graphic Warning Labels? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

According to researchers from the University of Bonn, non-smokers thinking of taking up the habit might think twice when they look at those pictures, but it’s going to require more than scare tactics to change the ways of chronic smokers.

utopianist.com/...cs-like-graphic-warning-labels

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Fear Emotion Advertising Smoking PSA

Jul

2011

Is smoking still defensible? - Health News, Health & Families - The Independent

The last time James Bond was seen puffing away on screen (when he was still played by Pierce Brosnan), the anti-smoking lobby were outraged at such blatant glorification of nicotine. No mention was made of his serial promiscuity, nor that he drove his car in excess of the speed limit, or even his relish for killing good, honest Russians. But lighting up in public? How dare he? For Simon Clark, spokesman for Forest (the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), this merely illustrates just how mad the world has become.

www.independent.co.uk/...-still-defensible-2306215.html

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Smoking Health Law Regulation

"Presumably you wouldn't be able to get away with: 'If you're fat, you're ugly', because that would be rude; insensitive. Nevertheless, it's become perfectly acceptable to persecute, and denigrate, smokers. But it shouldn't be. It's wrong."
"We live today in an over-regulated society in which the government interferes in every level of our lives," he says. "This used to be a nanny state. It's a bullying one now. I was in Austria recently for a smokers' conference and it was all so fantastically civilised. The coffee houses have indoor smoking areas, but they also have something else we don't: decent ventilation. That's all we need. As a non-smoker, I can tell you that the smoke didn't bother me, nor any of my fellow non-smokers. We all sat side-by-side. Now, tell me, why can't we live like that?"
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- The reasons, government health warnings (and cigarette packets themselves), will tell you is simple: health. Your habit will harm you – and us as well. Passive smoking, meanwhile, can cause asthma, cot death, heart attack. This is cold, hard, Royal College of Physicians-endorsed fact. Not that some smokers will ever accept it.
- Those that continue to smoke do so purely because they want to, but the extent of the ban is, they feel, unnecessary, and, worse, draconian. And yet new extremes continue to be mooted. Joe Jackson tells me that in certain parts of California, it is now illegal for apartment-dwellers to smoke at home, "lest their evil fumes get through the walls. It's ridiculous".
- The Royal College of Physicians also reminds us that 80,000 people die from smoking-related causes every year, which is more than the next five avoidable causes of death – alcohol, obesity, HIV, drug use and road traffic accidents – combined. Most people who smoke, according to Ash, wish they never started and want help to stop. "That is our primary goal," says Dockrell. "To help those that want to quit." And it is why, he adds, so many awareness campaigns might seem like bullying, in order to target those points that most resonate with the average smoker: family issues, health, smell.

Jun

2011

Researchers learning how nicotine works as an appetite suppressant

researchers have found that smokers have a lower body mass index than nonsmokers, and they have discovered that nicotine decreases the amount of food animals will eat.

arstechnica.com/...-as-an-appetite-suppresant.ars

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Nicotine Smoking Body Image

Mineur found that nicotine and a drug called cytisine both decrease the food intake of mice by up to 50 percent and lower the body fat mass by roughly 15 to 20 percent. Nicotine binds to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the central and peripheral nervous systems, and cytisine binds to those nicotinic receptors even more selectively. When a chemical is added that blocks the binding of cytisine to the nicotinic receptors, the mice exhibited less anorexic behavior. This led Mineur and his colleagues to conclude that activation of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are essential for decreasing appetite.