Dr. Janet Hurley

This is an open letter to youth who are considering smoking. It is not “cool,” it is not an easy habit to break in adulthood, and it is absolutely detrimental to your health. Just don’t do it.

It is widely accepted that teenagers try tobacco because they cave to peer pressure, and think it is a cool thing to do. Yet I ask you, how “cool” is it to drag an oxygen tank around with you to your grandson’s baseball game when you are 60? How cool is it to have a disability license plate on your car because you lack the stamina to walk in from the parking lot? How sad is it to forgo treasured activities, such as holiday events or simply going to church, because you are too embarrassed to have people see you huffing and puffing when trying to walk across a room? Smoking is certainly not cool when the complications occur.

A nicotine addiction is a hard habit to break. As a nonsmoker, I foolishly thought in my youth that quitting tobacco would simply be a matter of willpower. Then, I met a patient who had to breathe through a hole in his neck due to complications from smoking. Later, I found him outside smoking a cigarette through that hole in his neck while dragging around a flammable oxygen tank. Did he know smoking was bad for him? Absolutely, yes! Had he been told that he needed to quit smoking? Again, yes. Yet to him, the habit of smoking was as much of a part of his life as putting on his pants in the morning or eating dinner. After smoking every day for decades, people find it difficult to imagine themselves without their smoking routines. It becomes a “part of them,” and they are shrouded by a deception that they simply cannot quit. I have heard a common utterance from many patients who have tried unsuccessfully to quit smoking. They say, “I wish I had never started.” Don’t take this advice from me; take it from the generations of tobacco addicts who have lived their life in captivity to their addiction. Not starting the habit is much easier than quitting when you are older.

There is zero doubt that smoking is detrimental to your health. A study was done in 2016 by UT Health Northeast looking at the health status of Northeast Texas, and our statistics were awful. In the state health rankings, being first is good and being last is bad. If Northeast Texas was a state, we would rank 49th for heart disease mortality, 47th for chronic lower respiratory disease mortality, 51st for stroke mortality (dead last) and 45th overall for all-cause mortality. The state of Texas as a whole has an overall all-cause mortality ranking of 31st, so Northeast Texas is clearly not as good as the rest of Texas. All of these conditions are worsened by tobacco, and it is not surprising to see that Northeast Texas has a smoking rate of 23.4 percent, compared to the rest of Texas at 14.5 percent. In short, Texans in Northeast Texas are smoking their way into many chronic diseases that keep the hospitals full and contribute to the spiraling cost of health care in this region.

There is clear research proving that adolescent brains are prone to develop addiction pathways. People who start smoking after age 26 very rarely develop addiction, but 3 out of every 4 adolescents who smoke will continue smoking into adulthood. When your friends or family offer you a cigarette to “calm your nerves” or help you with stress, they are not being a good mentor. Instead they are introducing you to a life of indentured servitude to tobacco.

Smoking is not cool. It is not a healthy way to deal with stress. It is not an easy habit to break. It is absolutely bad for your health. I hope all adults who read this will share it with their children, their grandchildren, available school classrooms, legislators and anyone who will listen. And adults, for goodness sake, if you do nothing else, please do not ever give an adolescent a cigarette.