The number of smokers has gone down–fewer than one in five adults now smoke in the US, which is about half as many smokers as there were 50 years ago. Despite this, cigarettes kill more than 400,000 Americans every year. But the solution is at hand: make nicotine less addictive.

Most of us don’t realize it, but the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, signed in 2009, give the FDA the power to establish tobacco product standards including "provisions, where appropriate, for nicotine yields of the product." The thing they CAN’T do is require that nicotine levels be reduced to zero–but it can reduce them to NONaddictive levels.
read more

At last: Something GOOD about smoking! Birds in Mexico City are lining their nests with cigarette butts they pick up off the street, and scientists have discovered that they repel pests and keep the baby birds warm.

They’re filling their nests with up to 48 cigarette butts in order to make use of the repellent properties of tobacco. The nicotine and other chemicals in the cigarettes as a natural pesticide that repels parasitic mites (but what do they do to smokers?)
read more

Although Big Tobacco is creating a product that is totally bad for us, while $600-billion pharmaceutical industry is selling hope, they tend to use the same tactics–especially when it comes to lies.

Doctors don’t like to admit it, but often they don’t have any idea whether the drug they’re prescribing will work or not because the drug companies keep this information secret.

The Economist quotes researcher Ben Goldacre as saying, "Medicine is broken (and) the people you should have been able to trust to fix [its] problems have failed you."
read more

Quitting smoking makes you healthier AND it makes you nicer. And it turns out that while blacks have a harder time quitting, there is no difference in the quitting ability between the sexes.

Once you DO quit, you’ll not only SMELL nicer, you’ll BE nicer. Researchers have found evidence that shows those who quit smoking show improvements in their overall personality. And who would WANT to smoke, anyway, with all those nasty ingredients in cigarettes?
read more