Vital Signs

What Can Be Done?

Tobacco Use: Smoking

Smokers and smokeless tobacco users can:

• Quit. Ask your doctor for help in making a plan to quit or call 1-800-QUIT-NOW (800-784-8669; TTY 800-332-8615).
• Never smoke in your home, vehicles, or around nonsmokers, especially children, pregnant women, and persons with heart disease or respiratory conditions.

Parents and nonsmokers can:

• Quit if you smoke. Children of parents who smoke are twice as likely to become smokers.
• If you can't stop yet, never smoke or allow others to smoke in your home, vehicles, or around your children.
• Teach your children about the health risks of smoking and secondhand smoke.
• Not start, if you aren't already using tobacco.

Employers can:

• Establish a policy banning the use of any tobacco product indoors or outdoors on company property by anyone at any time.
• Provide all employees and their dependents with health insurance that covers support for quitting without copayment.

Retailers can:

• Learn the new FDA restrictions on youth access to tobacco products and tobacco marketing to youth, and closely follow them.
• Check the photo ID of any customer trying to buy tobacco products who appears to be 26 years of age or younger, and never sell any tobacco product to customers younger than 18 years of age.

Doctors, nurses, and other health care providers can

• Ask all patients and parents of pediatric patients whether they use tobacco, and advise those who do to quit.
• Advise everybody to make their homes and vehicles 100% smoke-free 24/7.
• Advise nonsmokers to avoid being exposed to secondhand smoke, especially if they are pregnant or have heart disease or respiratory conditions.

State and community leaders can:

• Consider the World Health Organization's MPOWER strategies in efforts to prevent and control tobacco use.
  
  Monitor tobacco use and prevention policies
  Protect people from tobacco smoke
  Offer help to quit
  Warn about the dangers of tobacco use
  Enforce bans on tobacco advertising
  Raise taxes on tobacco
• Establish comprehensive tobacco control programs funded at CDC-recommended levels and sustain them over time.
• Reduce tobacco use by making tobacco products less accessible, affordable, desirable, and accepted.

For more information, please contact
Telephone: 1-800-CDC-INFO (232-4636) TTY: 1-888-232-6348 E-mail: cdcinfo@cdc.gov Web: www.cdc.gov Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1600 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, GA 30333 Publication date: 09/07/2010