Since 1993, consumption of large cigars and cigarillos has increased 45
percent to the highest level in almost a decade. Use of premium cigars, which
can cost more than $10 each, is up an astounding 250 percent in that same
period. This marks a reversal in a 20-year decline in cigar smoking from 1973 to
1993.
Most of the increase appears to be among teenagers and young adult males who
smoke occasionally. And an amazing number of cigar smokers are children.
According to one study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta, about one of four teens say they have smoked cigars at least once. That
number is 4 out of 10 in a study among Massachusetts' high school seniors.
\"Why do teenagers smoke cigars? Why do they have tattoos and nose rings?\" asks
Dr. Kiel, the mother of a teenage daughter. \"Smoking cigars certainly doesn't
seem to make much sense, but they see it as a way to make a protest.\"
Teenagers have also seen an effective, if not always intentional, media campaign
that has portrayed cigar smoking as hip and glamorous. If cigar smoking is OK
for Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are about as cut and
buffed as Hollywood gets, then how bad can it be for the rest of us?
\"I just wish they would put Ulysses S. Grant or Babe Ruth on the cover of a
magazine,\" says Dr. Myssiorek with a sigh, who notes that each man suffered a
painful and excruciating death from throat cancer, almost certainly caused by
the trademark cigars each smoked. \"There is nothing glamorous about the way they
died,\" he says.
Yet cigar packages don't carry the Surgeon General's health warning required on
other tobacco products, and there have been few cigar studies that have been as
thorough as those with cigarettes. No one, in fact, has apparently studied the
effects of cigar smoking in women, because so few women have traditionally
smoked cigars.
Still, researchers have established links between cigar smoking and a number of
health risks:
- Carcinogens are the same.Most of the same carcinogens and cancer-producing
chemicals found in cigarettes, like tars and nicotine, are found in cigars.
That means cigar smokers increase their chances of heart disease and stroke.
- Death rates are higher.Overall cancer deaths among men who smoke cigars
are one-third higher than among nonsmokers. There also seems to be a link
between an increased chance of male breast cancer otherwise decidedly rare and
cigar smoking.
- Cancer risk increased.Studies indicate that all tobacco users are 5 to 10
times more likely to get cancer of the mouth or throat than their nonsmoking
counterparts. Cigar smokers who drink, incidentally, may be at the high end of
that range, since alcohol is extremely effective in dissolving the carcinogens
into the blood stream.
- Certain types of cancers more likely.Cigar smokers have 4 to 10 times the
risk of nonsmokers of dying from laryngeal, oral, or esophageal cancers.
Because of the way cigars are puffed, more carcinogens sit in the mouth,
increasing oral cancer risk.
And then there is the risk posed by secondhand smoke to those around cigar
smokers. Say what you will about not inhaling cigars, says Dr. Myssiorek, but
how are you going to justify the health risk posed to your family by all that
smoke the cigar is giving off?
Researchers found that the concentrations of carbon monoxide at two cigar social
events in San Francisco were higher than the levels found on a busy California
freeway. Had these indoor exposures lasted eight hours, they would have exceeded
the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for outdoor air established by the
Environmental Protection Agency.
\"You know, I'm a cancer doctor,\" says Dr. Kiel, \"and that means I have to see
the results of cancer. And head and neck cancers are ugly. We have to take part
of the jaw off. To save the larynx, we have to use radiation and chemotherapy.
Imagine what that does to someone's face. If I could tell cigar smokers one
thing, it would be that. Let them look at the results of cigar smoking.\"