Tagged: smoking

Tobacco companies are an extreme example of how greed trumps morality in America’s marketplace.  Every year roughly 500,000 smokers die from tobacco use and the industry knows it must at least replace those lost customers – plus the ones who successfully quit the addiction.

  Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, Ray Graf, and Selma Kaplan. Joe Donahue moderates.

This morning our discussion topics include:
• Bombing Suspect Charged
•Death penalty discussion with WAMC listeners
• NY Smoking Age to 21?
 

  New York State – and much of the nation – has made tremendous strides in reducing smoking rates.  In the mid-1960s, nearly half of Americans smoked; today it’s roughly half that nationwide and lower still in New York.

The successes have come as the result of scientific findings that have linked smoking to lung cancer and other health problems.  Those scientific breakthroughs also identified the health risks faced by nonsmokers who were exposed to second hand smoke from tobacco products.

It's that time of year again when millions of Americans vow to create good habits and break bad ones.

We welcome Jeremy Dean, the psychologist behind PsyBlog,  to explain why it is so difficult to modify our behavior -- and to stick with the change. His book is called Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick.

Tobacco kills more than 400,000 Americans every year and costs the country about $100 billion in health care bills.  Despite successes in curbing tobacco use over the past four decades, it still is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.