Since 1980, smoking-related diseases have increased dramatically. Smoking is now the leading known cause of preventable death and disease among women.
Each year during the 1990s it accounted for more than 140,000 deaths among U.S. women. By 1987, lung cancer had become the leading cause of cancer death among women, and in 2000 approximately 27,000 more women in the United States died of lung cancer (67,600) than of breast cancer (40,800).
Smoking claims women's lives through deaths due to other types of cancer as well as to cardiovascular, pulmonary, and other diseases.
The media, including women's magazines and broadcast programming, can play an important role in raising women's awareness of the magnitude of the impact of smoking on their health and in prioritizing the importance of smoking relative to the myriad other health-related topics covered.
Through its sponsorship of women's sports, professional and leadership organizations, and the arts, the industry has attempted to associate itself with things women most value.
Such associations should be decried for what they are: attempts by the tobacco industry to position itself as an ally of women's causes and thereby to silence potential critics.
Women should be appropriately concerned by and speak out against tobacco marketing campaigns that co-opt the language of women's empowerment. They should recognize the irony of attempts by the tobacco industry to suggest that smoking—which leads to nicotine dependence and death among many women—is a form of independence.
Source: Women and Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General—2001 |
