Tobacco – A status report

Despite the image enhancement that tobacco companies try to achieve by diversifying into other forms of businesses, sponsoring sports events or music, and doling out prizes and awards for gallantry, their practice of manufacturing and selling tobacco products continues to cause great harm to society.  And they continue to market and bank on tobacco sales for their profit.

Two thousand people will die today in India due to tobacco. India has 250 million tobacco users with around 900,000 succumbing to tobacco-related diseases every year.  We ranks 1st in the world for incidence of oral cancer, caused almost entirely by tobacco use. One of our senior ministers had to be operated in USA for cancer of the cheek due to his Gutka habit. Although his face reveals a lack of symmetry, it is a matter of satisfaction that he is cured of cancer, and has turned a major anti-Gutka campaigner in Maharashtra.

Tobacco has no nutritive value or health benefit. While smoking, one inhales 43 cancer causing substances, 15 harmful chemicals and 400 poisons, all in a single puff.  Tobacco contains nicotine that provides that little kick that people get of it. It is however addictive and habit forming.

The habit usually starts at a young age, usually in school or college, under “peer pressure”, when seniors get their juniors initiated. It usually starts with a spirit of adolescent experimentation or rebellion, and helps a young person enjoy a feeling of having “grown up”. The occasional fag then becomes a way of life, a fashion or personality statement and then very soon, a habit that gets increasingly difficult to kick. Smoking rates in India are growing at an alarming 7% annually.

The harmful effects of smoking are well known to even those who smoke: lack of stamina, chronic cough, heart disease, stroke and stomach ulcers. Smokers are at high risk of cancers, not just of lungs, but of the mouth, pancreas and bladder too. Contrary to the popular “macho” image projected by the tobacco industry, smoking reduces potency in men and causes infertility and birth defects in women.

Smokers tend to be self centered, with scant regard for the welfare of their families and those around.  Innocent children ad spouses exposed to 2nd hand smoking because of an uncaring man, are often harmed this way. They often develop asthma and bronchitis. Sudden infant deaths occur more commonly in homes where someone smokes. Spouses of smokers are at increased risk of developing premature heart disease and cancers. Further, children growing up in a “smoking home” are more likely to take to it in life.

One often finally kicks the habit after a major health problem like a heart attack. By then much narrowing of the arteries have already occurred. One wishes it was much earlier.

Use of tobacco remains a classical example of how irrational some of us can be despite belonging to the human race that claims rationality as its USP.

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 6 October, 2013.