Smoking & Tobacco

Let’s talk about cars for a bit. Many of us rely pretty heavily on our car and it’s important to us that they stay in good working condition. We bring them in for regular maintenance, oil changes, rotate the tires… all that stuff to get as many years of good driving out of them that we can. Now imagine you brought your car to the garage for an oil change and they noticed something really wrong with it. Something that could severely compromise the car’s performance and take years off its life. You’d expect them to ask you if you wanted it fixed, right?

This past weekend I was scrolling through my Netflix list looking for something to keep my attention for a brief period. There’s a lot going on in my house and I never get a full 2 hours for something, so movies tend to be consumed in about half hour installments, usually while I’m working at something else. I made a selection and was about 10 minutes through the opening sequence when everything just started to feel really familiar.

Remember when you were partying like it was 1999 (because it was) at your New Year’s Eve millennium/Y2K/Newmanium party? We were ringing in the future. The old-timey 1900s were coming to a close and it was time to usher in the 21st Century.

Welcome back, fellow public health enthusiasts! Last time you heard from me, I told you about Canada’s deadly addiction to smoking and the “Endgame” goal: A national smoking rate of under 5% by 2035. What I didn’t tell you is what we have to do to get there. The good news is that it’s definitely possible and that when we do, it will save tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year. The bad news: At first, not everyone is going to like it.

Canada’s goal is to lower the smoking rate to under 5% by 2035.  Ontario has pledged to reach 10% by 2023. What can we do for the smoking endgame to be anything more than a pipe dream?