How to stop smoking? Start taking pills!!!!

The first quit-smoking pill, designed specifically to stop the urge to light up, has arrived in South Africa.

Unlike the anti-depressant pill Zyban, which has side-effects that helped smokers quit, Champix is the first pill designed specifically to stop the urge for nicotine.

Over a 12-week cycle, the pill removes the desire for a smoking "high" by blocking the part of the brain that is satisfied by the effect of smoking.

Clinical psychologist and founder of the Society for Research on Tobacco and Nicotine, Dr Karl Fagerstrom, warned smokers of the dangers of their addiction at a media briefing in Johannesburg yesterday.

"One of every two smokers will die early," he said, adding that the problem was "more important than HIV or malaria".

Six million people worldwide die from smoking every year. In South Africa 31% of men and 9% of women smoke at least one cigarette a day.

Fagerstrom said smokers added to healthcare costs and spent less time working.

"They take more time out of their job to smoke and that is also a cost."

He said banning smoking in public places reduced the number of smokers.

"On average 4% of smokers give up [because of the regulations] and those who continue to smoke, smoke less."

The main effect of the legislation, he said, was to "denormalise tobacco culture". (from TimesLive)

A short history of the coffee drug.

They probably don't realise it, but a number of world leaders might benefit from learning something of the history of coffee before speechifying on narcotics and the law. The "war on coffee" is far older than Nixon's War on Drugs, but it proved equally ineffectual. For centuries, coffee was the subject of bans, controls and tariffs, religious proscription and noisy vilification. But it always crept back, smuggled through the ports, black marketed, cut with acorns or ground broad beans. Centuries of history only see it becoming cheaper and ever more available despite all attempts to control it. (from the Guardian)

A Rondavel

That is all...

















No deaths.... Just a Rondavel

125 South African smokers die A DAY!!!

About 125 of the 23% of South Africans who smoke die from the habit every day, the National Council Against Smoking said. This means a total of 44,400 deaths a year, said the council in a statement.

Reducing the prevalence of smoking from the 23% to 5% in the next three decades was possible. "But it will require an intensification of the tobacco control campaign. "In particular, the government will have to look at its tobacco taxation policies which are in urgent need of revision."

Global action a top priority

According to leading medical journal The Lancet, an urgent global action to cut tobacco use should be the top priority of government.

This would assist in the fight to reduce deaths from chronic diseases such as strokes, heart attacks and cancer.

A global team of scientists had proposed that the United Nations (UN) should aim for "a world essentially free of tobacco by 2040, where less than 5% of people use tobacco".

This recommendation would be made to the first UN High-Level Meeting of the General Assembly on chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) to be held in September 2011, The Lancet said.

The council said the meeting would provide the stage for powerful international action to develop, implement and fund actions against NCDs.

Every day, about 15,000 people die world-wide from diseases caused by tobacco.

"This rise is due to the tobacco industry's uncontrolled activities and persistent efforts to influence and weaken tobacco control policies," The Lancet said.

It added that key measures to prevent tobacco use were to raise tobacco taxes, place health warnings on tobacco packaging, smoke-free work and public places, a complete ban on all tobacco promotions, and control of illicit trade. (from News24)

South Africa's failed prohibition

The consequences of a policy, whether unintended or not, determine whether a policy has been successful or not. The South African government has adopted a one size fits all prohibitionist policy for "illicit" drugs and the results are in... We have a winner and the winner is.... Mitchells Plain. Well the children of Mitchells Plain to be more precise. The policy of prohibition has made drugs freely available to children. The policy of prohibition has resulted in all drugs being sold without regulation and freely on the street corners.... TO CHILDREN. This policy has produced the result of drugs being freely available to children - which is exactly what it set out to prevent.

Mitchells Plain: SA’s teen drug capital

DAGGA and tik remain the drugs of choice for school pupils in Mitchells Plain, with the most up-to-date research suggesting that dagga smoking in the area is so common that its prevalence is three times higher than the national average.

Worse still, the study revealed that substance abusers in Mitchells Plain were younger than their European counterparts, putting them at a much higher risk of developing drug dependency at an earlier age.

In addition, tik use was so prevalent in the area that its use now surpassed that of Ecstasy, cocaine and crack.

The study, conducted by Stellenbosch University and published in the SA Family Practice Journal, polled 400 pupils from 12 high schools in Mitchells Plain. It offers some of the most up-to-date statistics, pointing to an ever-growing problem.

Researchers found that at least 9 percent of all the pupils had used tik, while one in every 20 had used it during the previous year.

The prevalence for cannabis use was three times higher than the national prevalence rate of 10 percent, determined in 2007, the study showed.

But the statistics came as no surprise to those fighting drug abuse in the city.

The Cape Town Drug Counselling Centre’s Grant Jardine said that whenever drug use prevalence was studied in South Africa, Cape Town came out worst.

The new study also suggests that alcohol is the most common substance of choice among adolescents, with half of the pupils surveyed having consumed alcohol in their lifetime, and 34 percent having consumed it in the previous month.

The previous statistic reported for Cape Town was 31 percent.

Cigarette use was also highly prevalent, with more than double the number of pupils reporting having smoked cigarettes during their lifetime, when compared to pupils in the US and to South Africa as a whole.

The use of cannabis, for instance, was associated with the conversion of short-term memory into long term memory, cognitive impairment of comprehension and verbal recall, and mental illness – conditions that could lead to learning difficulties and ultimately to school dropouts.

“These potential learning difficulties apply to approximately 40 000 students in Mitchells Plain between the ages of 12 and 20 years, and may extrapolate into poor academic performance, school failure, school dropout, and a demand for additional learning resources,” said Hamdulay.

The use of illicit drugs was also associated with risky behaviour such as domestic abuse, risky sexual behaviour, carrying a knife and suicide attempts.

It was believed that cannabis was more popular in Mitchells Plain as it was easily available, inexpensive, easy to produce, and because the law prohibiting its use was not frequently enforced. (from IOL)