SDSU tobacco researchers find smoking harms more than your health

For every kid who can’t grow up fast enough, there are cigarettes.

Increased awareness of tobacco’s adverse effects and the resulting deluge of health warnings have had modest success on smoking prevention in adolescents, but the problem persists.

“People really still start smoking when they’re teenagers,” said Terry Conway, tobacco researcher at the San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health. “People who start smoking because it makes them feel grown up or cool don’t realize that they’re going to get addicted, and it’s very hard to break that cycle.”

Terry Conway

Despite difficulty combating the powerful forces that compel the young to smoke, research on prevention and cessation tactics has grown more sophisticated every year as researchers discover new evidence that tobacco adversely affects its users.

Extinguish that cigarette, fire up your career

These days, it’s more than lung cancer, emphysema and cardiovascular disease. New studies suggest that smoking can impact your lifestyle and even hit where it really hurts — your wallet.

Conway and fellow SDSU GSPH researcher Susan I. Woodruff looked at 5,500 females entering the Navy from 1996 to 1997. (Like all branches of the military, the Navy has a higher rate of smoking than in the civilian sector.)

Initially, they sought to prevent the recruits who were regular smokers from going back to cigarettes after eight weeks of boot camp, during which smoking is completely prohibited.

“A lot of these people, though, the first thing they wanted to do when they got out of boot camp was buy a pack of cigarettes,” Conway said.

Eight years later, Conway and Woodruff were granted access to objective career outcome data — desertions, dishonorable discharges, promotions, disciplinary action — for the recruits she had identified as women who had never smoked, women who were former smokers or occasional smokers, and women who were regular daily smokers.

The results were surprising.

“Compared to the women who never smoked prior to entering the Navy, the women who came in as daily regular smokers were less likely to finish their full term of enlistment, they had early attrition, more demotions, more desertions and more unauthorized leaves of absence,” Conway said. “They also achieved a lower overall pay grade.”

Though there are possible other explanations — smokers are acknowledged by researchers as being higher risk-takers, more impulsive and nonconformist, qualities that can hurt you in the workplace — the link between smoking and poor objective career outcomes was clear.

“If you stay in the Navy, if you just breathe regularly, you’re going to get promoted every once in a while just by virtue of having lasted in the service,” Conway said. “So we put total time spent in the service in as a control variable, and smokers still achieved a lower pay grade than the people who never smoked.”

The link remained consistent with people who identified themselves as former or occasional smokers; their performance outcomes fell between those of daily smokers and those who had never smoked, which was promising to Conway.

“If you can get those people to quit and become even just occasional smokers, it suggests they would have improved performance compared with the daily smokers,” she said. “It was encouraging to us that the people who had cut back, and were former daily smokers, had better performance outcomes.”

Where it hurts

If smoking is costly to individual workers, it is even more so nationally.

Smoking may cost you — in earning
potential.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs $167 billion in annual health-related economic losses ($75 billion in direct medical costs and $92 billion in lost productivity), and causes 438,000 deaths per year across the nation.

Looking at these figures, you might not guess that smoking has actually been on the decline in the United States since the 1970s.

But the problem is growing in places like Asia, according to GSPH professor John Elder, who conducted Project S.H.O.U.T., one of the best long-term prevention effects ever published.

From looking at the full impacts of environmental secondhand smoke and taking part in the California statewide tobacco control study to confronting the global spread of the epidemic and addressing the effects of policy changes on tobacco patterns, tobacco researchers at the San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health have been working to ease the cost of smoking since the school’s inception 25 years ago.

Going cold turkey

For those who choose to quit, the physiological addiction to nicotine lessens dramatically within one week. But many who succeed find the mental addiction never leaves.

Not helping matters is the success of the tobacco industry.

“The industry has tremendous power, and is creating new markets as fast as we are making dents in the current one,” Elder said.

While there is still no easy way to quit, advanced tobacco research and legislation are yielding strategies to make staying smoke-free easier for former smokers and would-be secondhand smokers.

“I think policies in the workplace and at home that restrict smoking are promising strategies, as are pricing strategies such as taxation,” Woodruff said.

Related information

• The Breathing Room Project
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tobacco Web site
• SDSU Graduate School of Public Health
• SDSU Student Health Services Smoking Cessation Brochure

Credits

• Story by Lauren Coartney
• Graphics by John Signer
• Photographs by Tom Farrington, Instructional Technology Services
  and Aaron J. Hoskins
• Edited by Happy F. Aston and Aaron J. Hoskins