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The facts about smoking are that when a cigarette is burnt, it releases more than 4,000 chemicals, several hundreds of which are dangerous to working systems of the human body, and 42 of which are known carcinogens. Within 7 10 minutes, nicotine immediately impacts the human brain which satisfies and stimulates smokers. However, nicotine effects decline after 30 minutes, so smokers will later feel tired, nervous and they will experience a stressful feeling. Smokers bodies need increasing amounts of nicotine and become addicted so they have difficulty in giving up smoking.

A result of smoking is that smokers have a lot of diseases because chemicals in cigarettes cause diseases such as lung cancer, mouth cancer or heart diseases. Moreover, cigarette smoke is also dangerous to surrounding people. Findings indicate that children who have smoking parents have more inflammation of the trachea and lung, pneumonia and asthma. For a pregnant woman, smoking could lead to lower birth weight of their baby, miscarriage or abortion.
Apparently, 1 in 3 non smokers who got lung cancer lived with smokers. Non – smoking women living with husbands and children who smoke have more opportunity (2 times) to get lung cancer than those whose husbands and children do not smoke. In addition, these women also have 3 times the risk of having heart diseases and a shorter life.

Quitting smoking not only provides health benefits to smokers but also stops destroying the health of surrounding people. Nowadays, the quitting smoking programs is one of method to help increase the number of smokers who quit by providing smokers correct advice for sustainable quitting practice. Mrs. Rattiya Patchnoi, a researcher and academic staff of the Tobacco Control Research and Knowledge Management Center (TRC) supported by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) conducted research entitled, Factors effective in quitting smoking of smokers participating in quit smoking clinics in Suratthani.

In order to understand the effectiveness of the quit smoking program, the program was separated into the Proactive program, the Reactive program, and Barriers to unsuccessful quitting by smokers. A research team studied and evaluated the quit smoking program in 350 smokers entering quit smoking clinics located in20 hospitals in Suratthani province. Moreover, an in-depth study was also conducted on 20 smokers in each of5 locations with quit smoking clinics.
For the Proactive program, participants learnt both theory and practice of activities during 3 months. For the Reactive program, participants received advice for 3 days, 45-60 minutes each day. The evaluation showed that the percentage of participants participating at an intermediate level in the Proactive program and the Reactive program was about the same at 56.1% and 54.1% respectively. Similarly, the percentages of participants in the Proactive program and the Reactive program who had good support from their family for quitting smoking was 63.0% and 62.3% respectively.

Comparing results of these two programs indicated that: (1) the percentages of smokers participating in the Proactive program that were able to quit smoking immediately, at 3, 6, 12 months, and one and one-half year were 58.1%, 58.1%, 60.9%, 61.2% and 55.0% respectively, and (2) the percentages of smokers participating in the Reactive program that were able to quit smoking immediately, at 3, 6, 12 months, and one and one-half year were 70.5%, 62.3%, 52.5%, 55.7% and 32.8% respectively.

When comparing the rate of quitting smoking in periods of the program ending at 3 months, 6 months and 12 months, results showed that there was not much difference in either the Proactive or the Reactive program. However, when considering those two programs for one year, quitting results of the Proactive program provided significantly higher quit rates than those in the Reactive program.

This analysis also found that resilience is important and can help smokers have more success in quitting smoking. If smokers do not have strong resilience, they would have strong urges to smoke when seeing their friends smoke or being in the same environment as smokers. However, smokers who were not voluntarily committed to the Quitting smoking program often were not concerned about cigarette dangers, and although some of them understood the program content, they did not prefer to practice according to the programs content.

This lesson was reported by Harris Taweewattana