Proven smoking cessation methods, including behavioral and pharmacologic approaches, benefit women and men alike.
Tobacco-use treatments are among the most cost-effective of preventive health interventions; they should be part of all women's health-care programs. Health insurance plans should cover such services.
Efforts to help women before, during, and after pregnancy stay tobacco free deserve high priority, because pregnancy is a time of high motivation to quit and occurs when women have many years of potential life left.
The knowledge that girls who are more academically inclined or more physically active are less likely to smoke suggests that supporting positive outlets for mental and physical development contribute to reducing tobacco use.
Because regular cigarette smoking typically is initiated early in the teenage years, effective smoking cessation and prevention programs for adolescent girls and young women are greatly needed.
Societal-level efforts to reduce tobacco use and exposure to environmental tobacco smoke include counter-advertising programs, increased tobacco taxes, laws to reduce youth access to tobacco products, and bans on public smoking.
Results from states such as Arizona, California, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, and Oregon show that smoking among both girls and women can be dramatically reduced. We need to encourage other states to make such investments.
California was the first state to establish a comprehensive statewide tobacco control program in 1990. From 1988 to 1997, the incidence rate of lung cancer among women declined by 4.8% in California, but increased by 13.2% in other regions of the United States.
Enormous monetary settlements from state Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry have provided the resources to fund major comprehensive statewide tobacco control efforts.
Source: Women and Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General—2001 |
