Recession makes ‘kicking the butt’ more difficult
POSTED June 23, 2009 - 10:56 | POSTED BY Jyoti Pal
Last edited by Harpreet Bhagrath on June 23, 2009 - 11:44
As many as 23 percent of the smokers interviewed by Ipsos MORI, a leading survey research organization in the UK, said that they have put off their plans to relinquish the habit.
Terming the findings as concerning, Jennifer Percival, tobacco policy advisor at the Royal College of Nursing, said, "We know that the earlier people quit, the better, so we need to make sure that those who are delaying quit plans are being offered effective options and support to help them to stop smoking successfully."
In all, the Ipsos MORI study, commissioned by McNeil Products Ltd, quizzed 877 smokers and ex-smokers.
Findings of the study
28 percent of those quizzed cited stressful jobs and financial anxieties as the reason for being tense. Due to this tension, they could not make a successful attempt to quit in the last six months.
With the results of the study, it could be extrapolated that as many as two million people across the United Kingdom have delayed plans to refrain from smoking.
A whopping 73 percent of the respondents said that smoking a cigarette gave a soothing impact when they were stressed.
A spokesman for the smokers' lobby group Forest noted, "If people want to give up that's great, but there is no doubt smokers do derive some comfort from tobacco in times of stress."
A quarter of the total quizzed admitted that they had started to smoke more during the downward spiral of the economy.
The study will be presented at the UK National Smoking Cessation Conference in London on Tuesday.
Smoking in India
While the exact impact of the recession on Indian smokers has not been ascertained, official figures indicate a rising occurrence of tobacco consumption in India.
In a country that has over a billion people, close to 57 percent males and 11 percent females allegedly consume tobacco in some form.
The Cigarette and other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act of 2003 has banned smoking in a public place in the country.
