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Canada: pharmacy tobacco sales to mentally ill people

Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, Alberta, Canada; cels@ualberta.ca

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The mental health community is finally waking up to the reality of mentally ill people being disproportionately affected by the tobacco epidemic. In Canada, about one in five people are affected by mental illness, and an estimated 50% of them (and up to 90% of schizophrenics) are smokers. They are also less likely to quit than the general population. For this group, too, the high cost of smoking often means that regular meals, family responsibilities, stable housing and other necessities are relinquished, leading to an inevitable exacerbation of a downward drift in society, with more social ills further marginalising them. To retain smokers and recruit new ones the tobacco industry has conducted extensive research on factors impacting on the mentally ill, who may be seen as an easy target - industry documents describe them as "anxious", "psychologically vulnerable", "angry", and "least likely to quit," to name only a few.

There . . . [Full text of this article]