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Rather than enhance masculinity, smoking has the exact opposite effect
For all the transitory fashions in approaches about how best to motivate smokers to quit, studies of ex-smokers and attempting quitters repeatedly affirm that the primary motivation for stopping smoking remains concern about health consequences—both in the future and those already being experienced.1 Despite folklore about youth being indifferent about their future health, there is evidence that health concerns motivate cessation among young smokers2,3 as well as in older smokers closer to slipping off life’s mortal coil.4 There is typically daylight between smokers’ nomination of health concerns and all other motivations like cost, social unacceptability and concerns about being smelly. This understanding and the mounting evidence that scare campaigns cause quitline meltdown5 and precipitate cessation6 has seen a global renaissance in efforts to worry smokers about the consequences of basting one’s lungs with tobacco smoke—some 87 000 times a year if you are a 20 a day, 12 puff per cigarette smoker.7
GRIM WARNINGS
Barely an organ or function of the …