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8 books match the query 'Tobacco use'

cover of Combating Teen Smoking: Research and Policy Strategies

Combating Teen Smoking

Research and Policy Strategies

Peter D. Jacobson, Paula M. Lantz, Kenneth E. Warner, Jeffrey Wasserman, Harold A. Pollack, and Alexis K. Ahlstrom

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Every year, more than 400,000 Americans die prematurely because of tobacco use. Most began smoking during their teen years. Adolescent tobacco use remains our nation's most preventable threat to life and health. This public health crisis has generated widespread debate over how best to prevent young people from initiating smoking or using other tobacco products. Combating Teen Smoking is an invaluable guide for policymakers and communities on the front lines of this prevention effort. Synthesizing recent research regarding the prevention and control of adolescent smoking, this book offers the reader a convenient compendium of what is known about adolescents and tobacco use; it also highlights areas where additional research is needed. Based on their assessment of the considerable amount of information presented, the authors recommend various ways to help slow--or even reverse--the recent rise in teenage smoking. A comprehensive antitobacco program might include, for example, antismoking media campaigns based on social marketing strategies, clean indoor air laws, and the increase of cigarette prices. Combating Teen Smoking will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers concerned about the problem of adolescent tobacco use, including policymakers who are actively seeking ways to help reduce teen smoking.
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cover of Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco: Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World

Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco

Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World

Susan G. Polansky

Bucknell University Press, 2026

This groundbreaking volume explores two early and opposing Spanish medical perspectives on chocolate and other New World substances. In the early 1600s, doctors Bartolomé Marradón and Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma returned from travels to the Americas with starkly different views: Marradón cautioned against tobacco and offered only limited approval of chocolate, while Colmenero vigorously defended chocolate’s health benefits. Their writings, translated and circulated across Europe, helped transform chocolate from a medicinal drink into a global commodity. Featuring the first bilingual edition of Marradón’s Dialogue (1618)—in full Spanish and English—and a new bilingual presentation of Colmenero’s influential Curious Treatise (1631), this book provides rare insight into early modern medical thought, cultural exchange, and the globalization of taste. Essential for readers of food history, early modern medicine, and transatlantic interchange, it uniquely reveals how debates over health, culture, and commerce brewed in a cup of chocolate.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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cover of Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West

Learning to Smoke

Tobacco Use in the West

Jason Hughes

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Why do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction that dominates news coverage and public health studies and invites us to reconsider how social and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it. Learning to Smoke examines the diverse sociological and cultural processes that have compelled people to smoke since the practice was first introduced to the West during the sixteenth century.

Hughes traces the transformations of tobacco and its use over time, from its role as a hallucinogen in Native American shamanistic ritual to its use as a prophylactic against the plague and a cure for cancer by early Europeans, and finally to the current view of smoking as a global pandemic. He then analyzes tobacco from the perspective of the individual user, exploring how its consumption relates to issues of identity and life changes. Comparing sociocultural and personal experiences, Hughes ultimately asks what the patterns of tobacco use mean for the clinical treatment of smokers and for public policy on smoking. Pointing the way, then, to a more learned and sophisticated understanding of tobacco use, this study will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of smoking and the sociology of addiction.
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cover of Lung Cancer Chronicles

Lung Cancer Chronicles

Meyer, M.D., John

Rutgers University Press, 1990

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cover of Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette

Pushing Cool

Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette

Keith Wailoo

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day.

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation.

In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.
 
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cover of Smoking and Pregnancy: The Politics of Fetal Protection

Smoking and Pregnancy

The Politics of Fetal Protection

Oaks, Laury

Rutgers University Press, 2001

The 1966 edition of the leading medical textbook states that pregnant women can safely smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet today, women who smoke during pregnancy are among the most vilified figures in public health campaigns. Laury Oaks argues this shift is not due solely to medical findings indicating that cigarette smoking may harm the fetus. Also responsible are a variety of social factors that converged more than a decade ago to construct the demonized category of the “pregnant smoker.”

This book charts the emergence of smoking during pregnancy as a public health concern and social problem. Oaks looks at the emphasis public health educators place on individual responsibility, the current legal and social assertion of fetal personhood, the changing expectations of pregnant and prepregnant women, and the advent of antismoking campaigns. She explores how public health educators discuss “the problem” with one another, how they communicate with pregnant smokers, and how these women themselves understand the “risk” of fetal harm. Finally, Oaks discusses the various meanings of “objective” statistics on the effects of smoking on the fetus, exploring the significance of cultural context in assessing the relative importance of those numbers. She argues that rather than bombarding pregnant women with statistics, health educators should consider the daily lives of these women and their socioeconomic status to understand why some women choose to smoke during pregnancy. Without downplaying the seriousness of the health risks that smoking poses to women and their babies, the book supports new efforts that challenge the moral policing of pregnant smokers.

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cover of The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco

The Smoke of the Gods

A Social History of Tobacco

Eric Burns

Temple University Press, 2006

"Fox News Watch" host Eric Burns, who chronicled the social history of alcohol in The Spirits of America turns to tobacco in The Smoke of the Gods. Ranging from ancient times to the present day, The Smoke of the Gods is a lively history of tobacco, especially in the United States. Although tobacco use is controversial in the U.S. today, Burns reminds us that this was not always the case. For centuries tobacco was generally thought to have medicinal and even spiritual value. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were tobacco users or growers, or both. According to Burns, tobacco changed the very course of U.S. history, because its discovery caused the British to support Jamestown, its struggling New World colony. An entertaining and informative look at a subject that makes daily news headlines, The Smoke of the Gods is a history that is, well, quite addictive.
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cover of The Smoking Book

The Smoking Book

Lesley Stern

University of Chicago Press, 1999

The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air.

Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.

The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.
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