Three strikes and you're out. Still from a television or cinema advertisement c. 1950s — A Lucky Strike Cigarette self-immolates and rapidly oxidizes by burning and combining with oxygen to the tune "for smoking that you're bound to like... you just can't beat a Lucky Strike."
The National Mental Health Charity Sane Australia revealed today (11/12/07) that 40% of individuals who smoke have a mental illness, and that 90% of individuals with schizophrenia are smokers.
The information suggests that smoking is fundamentally either or both a self-prescribed therapeutically unregulated off-label treatment for mental illness symptoms, or a substance which (when burnt and inhaled) produces/encourages mental illness.
This isn't surprising because smoking is the most preventable cause of morbidity in general, owing to its terrible whole-body effects, which reach into and stressfully deplete every organ, from the lungs to the skin and brain.
Brain scans of patients with mental illness reveal free radical damage to the brain, signifying cumulative damage attributable to inflammatory processes which destroy the physical basis behind pristine thought processes and encourage the mindlessness required to sustain positive identification as a smoker.
The figures also point to increasing physical marginalisation of smokers, because healthy society at large no longer tolerates indoor (or around-door) smoking, reflecting the symptoms of isolation and withdrawal individuals with mental illness experience.
Access Economics was commissioned for the research and found the total financial cost of smoking by people living with a mental illness is $33 billion a year, including costs of treatment for related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as loss of productivity.
Smoking also causes premature skin aging in a manner roughly commensurate with UV exposure, involving harmful visible processes in both the short and long term.
Smoking is also associated with many highly unattractive dermatological conditions, including poor wound healing, premature skin aging, squamous cell carcinoma, melanoma, yellowed and waxy skin, open pores, oral cancer, acne, psoriasis, and hair loss.
Although smokers sometimes complain about the high cost of cigarettes, annual tobacco tax in Australia is only in the order of $7 billion a year — around a fifth of what would be required to neutralise, at least financially, the harm smoking wreaks on the health and enjoyment of living in Australian society.
Such the true monetary cost of a single packet of cigarettes is in the order of thirty dollars.
"Friends... smoke only Camels for thirty days."
As long as you fuel a smoking habit — only made possible by the adulteration of tobacco by addictive nicotine, a substance intended to secure ongoing sales of insidious products no one in their right mind would choose to buy over and over again — you add momentum to the train wreck it invariably produces.
The time to quit smoking is always yesterday.
Smoking accelerates death by initiating and sustaining premature oxidative/unclean burning processes throughout every organ of the entire body.