stop smoking argumentative essay

Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Persuasive Essay About Smoking - Making a Powerful Argument with Examples

What You Need To Know About Persuasive Essay

A persuasive essay is a type of writing that aims to convince its readers to take a certain stance or action. It often uses logical arguments and evidence to back up its argument in order to persuade readers.

It also utilizes rhetorical techniques such as ethos, pathos, and logos to make the argument more convincing. In other words, persuasive essays use facts and evidence as well as emotion to make their points.

A persuasive essay about smoking would use these techniques to convince its readers about any point about smoking. Check out an example below:

Simple persuasive essay about smoking

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Persuasive Essay Examples About Smoking

Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death in the world. It leads to adverse health effects, including lung cancer, heart disease, and damage to the respiratory tract. However, the number of people who smoke cigarettes has been on the rise globally.

A lot has been written on topics related to the effects of smoking. Reading essays about it can help you get an idea of what makes a good persuasive essay.

Here are some sample persuasive essays about smoking that you can use as inspiration for your own writing:

Persuasive speech on smoking outline

Persuasive essay about smoking should be banned

Persuasive essay about smoking pdf

Persuasive essay about smoking cannot relieve stress

Persuasive essay about smoking in public places

Speech about smoking is dangerous

Persuasive Essay About Smoking Introduction

Persuasive Essay About Stop Smoking

Short Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Stop Smoking Persuasive Speech

Check out some more persuasive essay examples on various other topics.

Argumentative Essay About Smoking Examples

An argumentative essay is a type of essay that uses facts and logical arguments to back up a point. It is similar to a persuasive essay but differs in that it utilizes more evidence than emotion.

If you’re looking to write an argumentative essay about smoking, here are some examples to get you started on the arguments of why you should not smoke.

Argumentative essay about smoking pdf

Argumentative essay about smoking in public places

Argumentative essay about smoking introduction

Check out the video below to find useful arguments against smoking:

Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Smoking

You have read some examples of persuasive and argumentative essays about smoking. Now here are some tips that will help you craft a powerful essay on this topic.

Choose a Specific Angle

Select a particular perspective on the issue that you can use to form your argument. When talking about smoking, you can focus on any aspect such as the health risks, economic costs, or environmental impact.

Think about how you want to approach the topic. For instance, you could write about why smoking should be banned.

Check out the list of persuasive essay topics to help you while you are thinking of an angle to choose!

Research the Facts

Before writing your essay, make sure to research the facts about smoking. This will give you reliable information to use in your arguments and evidence for why people should avoid smoking.

You can find and use credible data and information from reputable sources such as government websites, health organizations, and scientific studies.

For instance, you should gather facts about health issues and negative effects of tobacco if arguing against smoking. Moreover, you should use and cite sources carefully.

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Make an Outline

The next step is to create an outline for your essay. This will help you organize your thoughts and make sure that all the points in your essay flow together logically.

Your outline should include the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. This will help ensure that your essay has a clear structure and argument.

Use Persuasive Language

When writing your essay, make sure to use persuasive language such as “it is necessary” or “people must be aware”. This will help you convey your message more effectively and emphasize the importance of your point.

Also, don’t forget to use rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos, and logos to make your arguments more convincing. That is, you should incorporate emotion, personal experience, and logic into your arguments.

Introduce Opposing Arguments

Another important tip when writing a persuasive essay on smoking is to introduce opposing arguments. It will show that you are aware of the counterarguments and can provide evidence to refute them. This will help you strengthen your argument.

By doing this, your essay will come off as more balanced and objective, making it more convincing.

Finish Strong

Finally, make sure to finish your essay with a powerful conclusion. This will help you leave a lasting impression on your readers and reinforce the main points of your argument. You can end by summarizing the key points or giving some advice to the reader.

A powerful conclusion could either include food for thought or a call to action. So be sure to use persuasive language and make your conclusion strong.

To conclude,

By following these tips, you can write an effective and persuasive essay on smoking. Remember to research the facts, make an outline, and use persuasive language.

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Persuasive Essay Writing

Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Craft an Engaging Persuasive Essay About Smoking: Examples & Tips

Published on: Jan 25, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 29, 2024

Persuasive Essay-Defined

A persuasive essay is a form of academic writing that presents an argument in favor of a particular position, opinion, or viewpoint.

It is usually written to convince the audience to take a certain action or adopt a specific viewpoint.

The primary purpose of this type of essay is to provide evidence and arguments that support the writer's opinion.

In persuasive writing, the writer will often use facts, logic, and emotion to convince the reader that their stance is correct.

The writer can persuade the reader to consider or agree with their point of view by presenting a well-researched and logically structured argument.

The goal of a persuasive essay is not to sway the reader's opinion. It is to rather inform and educate them on a particular topic or issue.

Check this free downloadable example of a persuasive essay about smoking!

Simple Persuasive essay about smoking

Read our extensive guide on persuasive essays to learn more about crafting a masterpiece every time.

Persuasive Essay Examples About Smoking

Are you a student looking for some useful tips to write an effective persuasive essay about the dangers of smoking?

Look no further! Here are several great examples of persuasive essays that masterfully tackle the subject and persuade readers creatively.

Persuasive speech on the smoking outline

Persuasive essay about smoking should be banned

Persuasive essay about smoking pdf

Persuasive essay about smoking cannot relieve stress

Persuasive essay about smoking in public places

Speech about smoking is dangerous

For more examples about persuasive essays, check out our blog on persuasive essay examples .

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Argumentative Essay About Smoking Examples

Our examples can help you find the points that work best for your style and argument.

Argumentative essay about smoking introduction

Argumentative essay about smoking pdf

Argumentative essay about smoking in public places

10 Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Here are a few tips and tricks to make your persuasive essay about smoking stand out:

1. Do Your Research

Before you start writing, make sure to do thorough research on the topic of smoking and its effects.

Look for primary and secondary sources that provide valuable information about the issue.

2. Create an Outline

An outline is essential when organizing your thoughts and ideas into a cohesive structure. This can help you organize your arguments and counterarguments.

Read our blog about creating a persuasive essay outline to master your next essay.

Check out this amazing video here!

3. Clearly Define the Issue

Make sure your writing identifies the problem of smoking and why it should be stopped.

4. Highlight Consequences

Show readers the possible negative impacts of smoking, like cancer, respiratory issues, and addiction.

5. Identity Solutions

Provide viable solutions to the problem, such as cessation programs, cigarette alternatives, and lifestyle changes.

6. Be Research-Oriented

Research facts about smoking and provide sources for those facts that can be used to support your argument.

7. Aim For the Emotions

Use powerful language and vivid imagery to draw readers in and make them feel like you do about smoking.

8. Use Personal Stories

Share personal stories or anecdotes of people who have successfully quit smoking and those negatively impacted by it.

9. Include an Action Plan

Offer step-by-step instructions on how to quit smoking, and provide resources for assistance effectively.

10. Reference Experts

Incorporate quotes and opinions from medical professionals, researchers, or other experts in the field.

These tips can help you write an effective persuasive essay about smoking and its negative effects on the body, mind, and society.

When your next writing assignment has you feeling stuck, don't forget that essay examples about smoking are always available to break through writer's block.

And if you need help getting started, our expert essay writer at CollegeEssay.org is more than happy to assist.

Just give us your details, and our persuasive essay writer will start working on crafting a masterpiece.

We provide top-notch essay writing service online to help you get the grades you deserve and boost your career.

Try our AI writing tool today to save time and effort!

Frequently Asked Questions

What would be a good thesis statement for smoking.

A good thesis statement for smoking could be: "Smoking has serious health risks that outweigh any perceived benefits, and its use should be strongly discouraged."

What are good topics for persuasive essays?

Good topics for persuasive essays include the effects of smoking on health, the dangers of second-hand smoke, the economic implications of tobacco taxes, and ways to reduce teenage smoking.

These topics can be explored differently to provide a unique and engaging argument.

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Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Last updated on: Apr 26, 2024

Craft an Outstanding Persuasive Essay About Smoking with Our Examples and Tips

By: Caleb S.

Reviewed By: Chris H.

Published on: Jan 25, 2023

Are you trying to write a persuasive essay about smoking? Do you want to prove that this habit is dangerous and should be avoided but are unsure how to do it convincingly?

Don't worry – we've got your back!

In this blog, we will provide persuasive essay examples and tips on how to make your argument truly persuasive! We'll help you to understand the dangers of smoking and to craft persuasive evidence that will make your essay powerful and persuasive.

With our tips, you can be sure that your persuasive essay about smoking will be a success!

So let's get started!

On this Page

What is a Persuasive Essay?

A persuasive essay is written to convince your reader of a particular opinion, point of view, or stance. These essays typically use persuasive devices such as logical arguments and emotional appeals to make their point.

The goal of persuasive essays about smoking is to convince your reader that smoking is dangerous and should be avoided. With persuasive evidence and reasonable opinions, you can do that!

Explore how to develop compelling arguments in your persuasive essay about smoking with our example as a guide!

Simple Persuasive essay about smoking

Check out our extensive guide on persuasive essay if you want to learn more!

Persuasive Essay Examples About Smoking

A persuasive essay effectively presents your opinion and makes the reader think twice about their stance on a particular issue.

Writing persuasive essays about smoking can be challenging, as there are many different arguments you can use to support your point of view.

To do this, you first need to understand the dangers of smoking and then craft persuasive evidence that supports your claims.

Persuasive speech on smoking outline

Persuasive essay about smoking should be banned

Persuasive essay about smoking pdf

Persuasive essay about smoking cannot relieve stress

Persuasive essay about smoking in public places

Speech about smoking is dangerous

Want more examples? See our persuasive essay examples blog!

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

Argumentative Essay About Smoking Examples

Argumentative essay writing can be difficult, especially regarding topics like smoking. To make a persuasive argument, you must provide evidence that supports your stance.

We have provided persuasive essay examples about smoking to help you craft a persuasive argument on this topic.

Let's look at how to craft persuasive arguments in your argumentative essay about smoking with the help of our examples!

Argumentative essay about smoking introduction

Argumentative essay about smoking pdf

Argumentative essay about smoking in public places

Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Smoking

How do you make sure that your argument persuades the reader?

Here are some tips to ensure that your argument is effective.

Start With an Engaging Introduction

The introduction of your essay should set the tone for the rest of the essay. It should catch readers' attention and make them want to continue reading.

Your introduction should include a clear thesis statement summarizing your smoking opinion. This will give the reader an understanding of where you stand on this issue.

Explore our guide for a thesis statement to learn how to write an effective one!

Research is Key

When creating an argument, you want to ensure you have all the facts and figures on your side.

Do some research related to your topic to make a compelling argument. This will help give credibility to what you’re saying and convince others more easily.

Use Credible Resources

When researching for your persuasive essay, it’s important to use reliable sources like scientific journals or government websites. These sources provide factual evidence that can support your claims credibly.

When using these resources, cite them correctly to avoid plagiarism and maintain academic integrity.

Construct Your Argument Logically

Once you have gathered your research, it’s time to start constructing your argument.

Using logical arguments helps keep readers engaged and allows them to see why you believe what you believe in an organized manner.

Additionally, don’t forget to include counterarguments so that readers can see both sides of the issue before forming their own opinion.

If you want to know how to construct an outline for your persuasive essay, check out our blog of persuasive essay outline !

Be Creative

The best way to get someone interested in what you have to say is by being creative with how you present it. If there are any interesting stories or anecdotes related to the topic, include them!

Doing this can help break up the monotony of an essay and make it easier for people to connect with what you’re saying.

If you want to explore some interesting topics, see our persuasive essay topics blog!

Crafting an effective persuasive essay or speech about smoking doesn’t have to be difficult if you keep these tips in mind!

You can also check out this video for creating logical arguments for your persuasive essay!

In conclusion, crafting an effective persuasive essay about smoking doesn’t have to be difficult if you keep these tips in mind! Get help from our examples to get you started on your persuasive essay.

Be sure to use persuasive language and persuasive techniques to make your point!

If you are still stuck, you can always count on MyPerfectPpaper.net to help you craft the persuasive essay you want.

Our essay writing service can provide expert persuasive writing help tailored to your needs. We'll help you create essays that will make a lasting impression on your reader.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What would be a good thesis statement for smoking.

Smoking is an addiction that ruins lives. It harms not only the smoker but also those around them. Smoking should be banned in all public places to protect the health of everyone.

What is a good way to start a persuasive essay?

A good way to begin is by introducing your topic and stating your position. Then, you can provide evidence or examples to support your position. Finally, you can ask the reader to take action or think about the issue differently.

What are good topics for persuasive essays?

How to quit smoking cigarettes for good?
How to resist the temptation of smoking in difficult situations?
How to motivate yourself to stop smoking cigarettes?
How to deal with cravings for cigarettes when trying to quit smoking?
How to stay smoke-free after quitting smoking?

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How To Write A Smoking Essay That Will Blow Your Classmates out of the Water

Writing a Smoking Essay. Complete Actionable Guide

A smoking essay might not be your first choice, but it is a common enough topic, whether it is assigned by a professor or left to your choice. Today we’ll take you through the paces of creating a compelling piece, share fresh ideas for writing teen smoking essays, and tackle the specifics of the essential parts of any paper, including an introduction and a conclusion.

Why Choose a Smoking Essay?

If you are free to select any topic, why would you open this can of worms? There are several compelling arguments in favor, such as:

A smoking essay can fit any type of writing assignment. You can craft an argumentative essay about smoking, a persuasive piece, or even a narration about someone’s struggle with quitting. It’s a rare case of a one-size-fits-all topic.
There is an endless number of environmental essay topics ideas . From the reasons and history of smoking to health and economic impact, as well as psychological and physiological factors that make quitting so challenging.
A staggering number of reliable sources are available online. You won’t have to dig deep to find medical or economic research, there are thousands of papers published in peer-reviewed journals, ready and waiting for you to use them.

Essential Considerations for Your Essay on Smoking

Whether you are writing a teenage smoking essay or a study of health-related issues, you need to stay objective and avoid including any judgment into your assignment. Even if you are firmly against smoking, do not let emotions direct your writing. You should also keep your language tolerant and free of offensive remarks or generalizations.

The rule of thumb is to keep your piece academic. It is an essay about smoking cigarettes you have to submit to your professor, not a blog post to share with friends.

How to Generate Endless Smoking Essay Topic Ideas

At first, it might seem that every theme has been covered by countless generations of your predecessors. However, there are ways to add a new spin to the dullest of topics. We’ll share a unique approach to generating new ideas and take the teenage smoking essay as an example. To make it fresh and exciting, you can:

Add a historic twist to your topic. For instance, research the teenage smoking statistics through the years and theorize the factors that influence the numbers.
Compare the data across the globe. You can select the best scale for your paper, comparing smoking rates in the neighboring cities, states, or countries.
Look at the question from an unexpected perspective. For instance, research how the adoption of social media influenced smoking or whether music preferences can be related to this habit.

The latter approach on our list will generate endless ideas for writing teen smoking essays. Select the one that fits your interests or is the easiest to research, depending on the time and effort you are willing to put into essay writing .

How To Write An Essay About Smoking Cigarettes

A smoking essay follows the same rules as an academic paper on any other topic. You start with an introduction, fill the body paragraphs with individual points, and wrap up using a conclusion. The filling of your “essay sandwich” will depend on the topic, but we can tell for sure what your opening and closing paragraphs should be like.

Smoking Essay Introduction

Whether you are working on an argumentative essay about smoking or a persuasive paper, your introduction is nothing but a vessel for a thesis statement. It is the core of your essay, and its absence is the first strike against you. Properly constructed thesis sums up your point of view on the economic research topics and lists the critical points you are about to highlight. If you allude to the opposing views in your thesis statement, the professor is sure to add extra points to your grade.

The first sentence is crucial for your essay, as it sets the tone and makes the first impression. Make it surprising, exciting, powerful with facts, statistics, or vivid images, and it will become a hook to lure the reader in deeper.

Round up the introduction with a transition to your first body passage and the point it will make. Otherwise, your essay might seem disjointed and patchy. Alternatively, you can use the first couple of sentences of the body paragraph as a transition.

Smoking Essay Conclusion

Any argumentative and persuasive essay on smoking must include a short conclusion. In the final passage, return to your thesis statement and repeat it in other words, highlighting the points you have made throughout the body paragraphs. You can also add final thoughts or even a personal opinion at the end to round up your assignment.

Think of the conclusion as a mirror reflection of your introduction. Start with a transition from the last body paragraph, follow it with a retelling of your thesis statement, and complete the passage with a powerful parting thought that will stay with the reader. After all, everyone remembers the first and last points most vividly, and your opening and closing sentences are likely to have a significant influence on the final grade.

Bonus Tips on How to Write a Persuasive Essay About Smoking

With the most challenging parts of the smoking essay out of the way, here are a couple of parting tips to ensure your paper gets the highest grade possible:

Do not rely on samples you find online to guide your writing. You can never tell what grade a random essay about smoking cigarettes received. Unless you use winning submissions from essay competitions, you might copy faulty techniques and data into your paper and get a reduced grade.
Do not forget to include references after the conclusion and cite the sources throughout the paper. Otherwise, you might get accused of academic dishonesty and ruin your academic record. Ask your professor about the appropriate citation style if you are not sure whether you should use APA, MLA, or Chicago.
Do not submit your smoking essay without editing and proofreading first. The best thing you can do is leave the piece alone for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes and mind to check for redundancies, illogical argumentation, and irrelevant examples. Professional editing software, such as Grammarly, will help with most typos and glaring errors. Still, it is up to you to go through the paper a couple of times before submission to ensure it is as close to perfection as it can get.
Do not be shy about getting help with writing smoking essays if you are out of time. Professional writers can take over any step of the writing process, from generating ideas to the final round of proofreading. Contact our agents or skip straight to the order form if you need our help to complete this assignment.

We hope our advice and ideas for writing teen smoking essays help you get out of the slump and produce a flawless piece of writing worthy of an A. For extra assistance with choosing the topic, outlining, writing, and editing, reach out to our support managers .

Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Last updated on: Jan 2, 2024

Writing Persuasive Essays About Smoking? Use These Samples

By: Donna C.

Reviewed By: Jacklyn H.

Published on: Jan 25, 2023

Smoking is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and it's not just smokers who are affected.

It's hard to find good essay examples about smoking that will help you write convincing arguments.

Occasionally when you're trying to find examples of persuasive essays, you end up reading articles that are poorly written.

We can arm you with persuasive essay examples about smoking that will help you write convincing arguments.

Let’s get started.

On this Page

What Is A Persuasive Essay?

A persuasive essay is a type of writing that seeks to convince the reader to accept a particular point of view.

It is written to persuade readers to take action or adopt a certain viewpoint.

Most people prefer writing on controversial persuasive essay topics , as they are perfect for arguing.

They may include a call to action or an appeal to emotion, but they should always be backed up with evidence.

The goal of a persuasive essay is to convince readers that your opinion is valid and worthy of consideration.

Here is a simple example to improve your understanding.

Simple Persuasive essay about smoking

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Persuasive Essay Examples About Smoking

Writing a persuasive essay about smoking requires an understanding of why it is both beneficial and detrimental.

Here are some examples about smoking that can provide inspiration for your writing:

Persuasive speech on smoking outline

Persuasive essay about smoking should be banned

Persuasive essay about smoking pdf

Persuasive essay about smoking cannot relieve stress

Persuasive essay about smoking in public places

Speech about smoking is dangerous

Struggling to start your essay? Checkout how you can create a persuasive essay outline !

Argumentative Essay About Smoking Examples

To help you better understand how to write an argumentative essay about smoking, let's look at some examples.

Argumentative essay about smoking introduction

Argumentative essay about smoking pdf

Argumentative essay about smoking in public places

Looking for more samples? Check out these persuasive essay examples !

Tips For Writing a Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Writing a persuasive essay about cigarette smoking can be challenging. Here are some tips you can follow to make the writing process easier.

1. Show the facts

Include statistics, examples, and case studies to build a strong argument for why smoking should be banned or discouraged.

2. Be direct

Make sure your message is clear and convincing by getting straight to the point when making your argument.

3. Speak from experience

Share personal experiences with smoking or stories of others you have heard to make your argument more powerful.

4. Acknowledge the other side

Be sure to address any counterarguments and acknowledge why people may disagree with you. You should also try to explain why your position is stronger.

5. Emphasize the consequences

Showing how smoking can harm a person’s health, and the environment can make your argument even more compelling. For example, you can talk about how smoking leads to lung cancer.

This video talks about some consequences of smoking that you can use.

6. Call to action

End your essay with a call to action that encourages readers to take steps towards further educating themselves on the issue. For example, you can ask the reader to stop smoking for the good of their children.

7. Lead by example

Advocating for anti-smoking initiatives will help spread your message and convince more people to reconsider their lifestyle choices.

Remember, smoking is a serious issue with potentially life-threatening consequences. The only way to combat it effectively is by being persuasive and getting our message across.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

To sum up, writing a persuasive essay about smoking can be a powerful way to spread awareness about smoking. Using facts, examples, stories, and CTAs, you can create an essay that will convince stubborn smokers to reconsider their lifestyle choices.

Remember, your words have power – use them for good and help make a difference in the fight against smoking!

At SharkPapers.com, we provide a comprehensive essay writing service to help you create an effective argument.

Our expert persuasive essay writers have the necessary experience to craft a compelling argument that convinces your reader.

From crafting an outline and writing the content, our essay writer will ensure that your persuasive essay stands out. This is why we strive to provide you with the best persuasive essay writing service tailored specifically to your needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What would be a good thesis statement for smoking.

A good thesis statement for a persuasive essay on smoking could be something like this:

“Smoking is not only dangerous to your health, but it also costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year in healthcare expenses. Additionally, cigarettes are a leading cause of fires and death in the United States. For all these reasons, it's clear that smoking should be banned.”

What are good topics for persuasive essays?

Here are some good topics for persuasive essays on smoking:

The dangers of smoking and the health risks associated with it.
How smoking affects non-smokers, including children, through secondhand smoke.
How quitting smoking can improve your overall health and extend your life expectancy.

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Essay on Smoking

500 words essay on smoking.

One of the most common problems we are facing in today’s world which is killing people is smoking. A lot of people pick up this habit because of stress , personal issues and more. In fact, some even begin showing it off. When someone smokes a cigarette, they not only hurt themselves but everyone around them. It has many ill-effects on the human body which we will go through in the essay on smoking.

Ill-Effects of Smoking

Tobacco can have a disastrous impact on our health. Nonetheless, people consume it daily for a long period of time till it’s too late. Nearly one billion people in the whole world smoke. It is a shocking figure as that 1 billion puts millions of people at risk along with themselves.

Cigarettes have a major impact on the lungs. Around a third of all cancer cases happen due to smoking. For instance, it can affect breathing and causes shortness of breath and coughing. Further, it also increases the risk of respiratory tract infection which ultimately reduces the quality of life.

In addition to these serious health consequences, smoking impacts the well-being of a person as well. It alters the sense of smell and taste. Further, it also reduces the ability to perform physical exercises.

It also hampers your physical appearances like giving yellow teeth and aged skin. You also get a greater risk of depression or anxiety . Smoking also affects our relationship with our family, friends and colleagues.

Most importantly, it is also an expensive habit. In other words, it entails heavy financial costs. Even though some people don’t have money to get by, they waste it on cigarettes because of their addiction.

How to Quit Smoking?

There are many ways through which one can quit smoking. The first one is preparing for the day when you will quit. It is not easy to quit a habit abruptly, so set a date to give yourself time to prepare mentally.

Further, you can also use NRTs for your nicotine dependence. They can reduce your craving and withdrawal symptoms. NRTs like skin patches, chewing gums, lozenges, nasal spray and inhalers can help greatly.

Moreover, you can also consider non-nicotine medications. They require a prescription so it is essential to talk to your doctor to get access to it. Most importantly, seek behavioural support. To tackle your dependence on nicotine, it is essential to get counselling services, self-materials or more to get through this phase.

One can also try alternative therapies if they want to try them. There is no harm in trying as long as you are determined to quit smoking. For instance, filters, smoking deterrents, e-cigarettes, acupuncture, cold laser therapy, yoga and more can work for some people.

Always remember that you cannot quit smoking instantly as it will be bad for you as well. Try cutting down on it and then slowly and steadily give it up altogether.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Smoking

Thus, if anyone is a slave to cigarettes, it is essential for them to understand that it is never too late to stop smoking. With the help and a good action plan, anyone can quit it for good. Moreover, the benefits will be evident within a few days of quitting.

FAQ of Essay on Smoking

Question 1: What are the effects of smoking?

Answer 1: Smoking has major effects like cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and more. It also increases the risk for tuberculosis, certain eye diseases, and problems with the immune system .

Question 2: Why should we avoid smoking?

Answer 2: We must avoid smoking as it can lengthen your life expectancy. Moreover, by not smoking, you decrease your risk of disease which includes lung cancer, throat cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, and more.

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In the process of your research on essay or persuasive speech on smoking , you will most likely find out that there is a certain study, which says this way works better than the other. Then you just turn the next page and see that there is another way to quit smoking and it’s better than all what you knew before. As you see, it’s a never-ending story. As an alternative, you may dedicate your paper to putting together a special quit smoking program, which can be applied by the others.

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Writing an Essay or a Speech About Smoking: Successful Quit-Smoking Plan

Once you decide to work out a booming quit smoking program, make sure to include the following elements in your essay:

Pharmacological products appropriate use . Those, who are severely addicted to the cigarettes, could consider using nicotine-replacement elements so that the body could gradually get rid of nicotine-addiction. Make sure to recommend your audience to consult their doctors before using the drugs.
One-to-one counseling. It is highly important to point out that qualified support helps smokers to identify their aims. Moreover, in the moments of weakness, a professional counselor will help to prevent relapse. Consider telephone counseling, one-to-one counseling, group support, internet programs for smokers, etc.
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Improve Your Knowledge. Tell your readers to read the science, converse with the experienced experts in order to make 100% sure how smoking ruins their health and the health of the people around. Being aware of how the others have tackled life-saving challenge will give courage to those, who are still fighting the addiction!

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Smoking — Should Smoking Be Made Illegal: Argumentative

Should Smoking Be Made Illegal: Argumentative

Categories: Smoking Smoking Ban Tobacco

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Updated: 8 December, 2023

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Works Cited

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/effects_cig_smoking/index.htm
Chatterjee, K., & Chatterjee, K. (2014). Secondhand Smoke: Are We Protecting Our Children? Lung India, 31(4), 369–377.
Foulds, J., Ramstrom, L., Burke, M., & Fagerström, K. (2003). Effect of Smokeless Tobacco (Snus) on Smoking and Public Health in Sweden. Tobacco Control, 12(4), 349–359.
Hatsukami, D. K., & Stead, L. F. (2020). Tobacco Use: Prevention, Cessation, and Control. Oxford University Press.
Hu, T.-W., Lee, A. H.-Y., Mao, Z., & Ong, M. (2016). China at the Crossroads: The Economics of Tobacco and Health. World Scientific Publishing.
National Cancer Institute. (2020). Harms of Cigarette Smoking and Health Benefits of Quitting. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/tobacco/cessation-fact-sheet
Peto, R., Lopez, A. D., Boreham, J., Thun, M., & Heath, C. Jr. (2016). Mortality from Smoking in Developed Countries 1950-2010: Indirect Estimates from National Vital Statistics. Oxford University Press.
Schick, S., & Glantz, S. (2005). Philip Morris Toxicological Experiments with Fresh Sidestream Smoke: More Toxic than Mainstream Smoke. Tobacco Control, 14(6), 396–404.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2014). The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health.
World Health Organization. (2019). WHO Global Report on Trends in Prevalence of Tobacco Smoking 2000-2025, Second Edition. World Health Organization.

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National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (US) Office on Smoking and Health. Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US); 2012.

Cover of Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults

Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General.

1 introduction, summary, and conclusions.

Introduction

Tobacco use is a global epidemic among young people. As with adults, it poses a serious health threat to youth and young adults in the United States and has significant implications for this nation’s public and economic health in the future ( Perry et al. 1994 ; Kessler 1995 ). The impact of cigarette smoking and other tobacco use on chronic disease, which accounts for 75% of American spending on health care ( Anderson 2010 ), is well-documented and undeniable. Although progress has been made since the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health in 1964 ( U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare [USDHEW] 1964 ), nearly one in four high school seniors is a current smoker. Most young smokers become adult smokers. One-half of adult smokers die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases ( Fagerström 2002 ; Doll et al. 2004 ). Despite thousands of programs to reduce youth smoking and hundreds of thousands of media stories on the dangers of tobacco use, generation after generation continues to use these deadly products, and family after family continues to suffer the devastating consequences. Yet a robust science base exists on social, biological, and environmental factors that influence young people to use tobacco, the physiology of progression from experimentation to addiction, other health effects of tobacco use, the epidemiology of youth and young adult tobacco use, and evidence-based interventions that have proven effective at reducing both initiation and prevalence of tobacco use among young people. Those are precisely the issues examined in this report, which aims to support the application of this robust science base.

Nearly all tobacco use begins in childhood and adolescence ( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [USDHHS] 1994 ). In all, 88% of adult smokers who smoke daily report that they started smoking by the age of 18 years (see Chapter 3 , “The Epidemiology of Tobacco Use Among Young People in the United States and Worldwide”). This is a time in life of great vulnerability to social influences ( Steinberg 2004 ), such as those offered through the marketing of tobacco products and the modeling of smoking by attractive role models, as in movies ( Dalton et al. 2009 ), which have especially strong effects on the young. This is also a time in life of heightened sensitivity to normative influences: as tobacco use is less tolerated in public areas and there are fewer social or regular users of tobacco, use decreases among youth ( Alesci et al. 2003 ). And so, as we adults quit, we help protect our children.

Cigarettes are the only legal consumer products in the world that cause one-half of their long-term users to die prematurely ( Fagerström 2002 ; Doll et al. 2004 ). As this epidemic continues to take its toll in the United States, it is also increasing in low- and middle-income countries that are least able to afford the resulting health and economic consequences ( Peto and Lopez 2001 ; Reddy et al. 2006 ). It is past time to end this epidemic. To do so, primary prevention is required, for which our focus must be on youth and young adults. As noted in this report, we now have a set of proven tools and policies that can drastically lower youth initiation and use of tobacco products. Fully committing to using these tools and executing these policies consistently and aggressively is the most straight forward and effective to making future generations tobacco-free.

The 1994 Surgeon General’s Report

This Surgeon General’s report on tobacco is the second to focus solely on young people since these reports began in 1964. Its main purpose is to update the science of smoking among youth since the first comprehensive Surgeon General’s report on tobacco use by youth, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People , was published in 1994 ( USDHHS 1994 ). That report concluded that if young people can remain free of tobacco until 18 years of age, most will never start to smoke. The report documented the addiction process for young people and how the symptoms of addiction in youth are similar to those in adults. Tobacco was also presented as a gateway drug among young people, because its use generally precedes and increases the risk of using illicit drugs. Cigarette advertising and promotional activities were seen as a potent way to increase the risk of cigarette smoking among young people, while community-wide efforts were shown to have been successful in reducing tobacco use among youth. All of these conclusions remain important, relevant, and accurate, as documented in the current report, but there has been considerable research since 1994 that greatly expands our knowledge about tobacco use among youth, its prevention, and the dynamics of cessation among young people. Thus, there is a compelling need for the current report.

Tobacco Control Developments

Since 1994, multiple legal and scientific developments have altered the tobacco control environment and thus have affected smoking among youth. The states and the U.S. Department of Justice brought lawsuits against cigarette companies, with the result that many internal documents of the tobacco industry have been made public and have been analyzed and introduced into the science of tobacco control. Also, the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco companies resulted in the elimination of billboard and transit advertising as well as print advertising that directly targeted underage youth and limitations on the use of brand sponsorships ( National Association of Attorneys General [NAAG] 1998 ). This settlement also created the American Legacy Foundation, which implemented a nationwide antismoking campaign targeting youth. In 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a law that gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products in order to promote the public’s health ( Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act 2009 ). Certain tobacco companies are now subject to regulations limiting their ability to market to young people. In addition, they have had to reimburse state governments (through agreements made with some states and the Master Settlement Agreement) for some health care costs. Due in part to these changes, there was a decrease in tobacco use among adults and among youth following the Master Settlement Agreement, which is documented in this current report.

Recent Surgeon General Reports Addressing Youth Issues

Other reports of the Surgeon General since 1994 have also included major conclusions that relate to tobacco use among youth ( Office of the Surgeon General 2010 ). In 1998, the report focused on tobacco use among U.S. racial/ethnic minority groups ( USDHHS 1998 ) and noted that cigarette smoking among Black and Hispanic youth increased in the 1990s following declines among all racial/ethnic groups in the 1980s; this was particularly notable among Black youth, and culturally appropriate interventions were suggested. In 2000, the report focused on reducing tobacco use ( USDHHS 2000b ). A major conclusion of that report was that school-based interventions, when implemented with community- and media-based activities, could reduce or postpone the onset of smoking among adolescents by 20–40%. That report also noted that effective regulation of tobacco advertising and promotional activities directed at young people would very likely reduce the prevalence and onset of smoking. In 2001, the Surgeon General’s report focused on women and smoking ( USDHHS 2001 ). Besides reinforcing much of what was discussed in earlier reports, this report documented that girls were more affected than boys by the desire to smoke for the purpose of weight control. Given the ongoing obesity epidemic ( Bonnie et al. 2007 ), the current report includes a more extensive review of research in this area.

The 2004 Surgeon General’s report on the health consequences of smoking ( USDHHS 2004 ) concluded that there is sufficient evidence to infer that a causal relationship exists between active smoking and (a) impaired lung growth during childhood and adolescence; (b) early onset of decline in lung function during late adolescence and early adulthood; (c) respiratory signs and symptoms in children and adolescents, including coughing, phlegm, wheezing, and dyspnea; and (d) asthma-related symptoms (e.g., wheezing) in childhood and adolescence. The 2004 Surgeon General’s report further provided evidence that cigarette smoking in young people is associated with the development of atherosclerosis.

The 2010 Surgeon General’s report on the biology of tobacco focused on the understanding of biological and behavioral mechanisms that might underlie the pathogenicity of tobacco smoke ( USDHHS 2010 ). Although there are no specific conclusions in that report regarding adolescent addiction, it does describe evidence indicating that adolescents can become dependent at even low levels of consumption. Two studies ( Adriani et al. 2003 ; Schochet et al. 2005 ) referenced in that report suggest that because the adolescent brain is still developing, it may be more susceptible and receptive to nicotine than the adult brain.

Scientific Reviews

Since 1994, several scientific reviews related to one or more aspects of tobacco use among youth have been undertaken that also serve as a foundation for the current report. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) ( Lynch and Bonnie 1994 ) released Growing Up Tobacco Free: Preventing Nicotine Addiction in Children and Youths, a report that provided policy recommendations based on research to that date. In 1998, IOM provided a white paper, Taking Action to Reduce Tobacco Use, on strategies to reduce the increasing prevalence (at that time) of smoking among young people and adults. More recently, IOM ( Bonnie et al. 2007 ) released a comprehensive report entitled Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the Nation . Although that report covered multiple potential approaches to tobacco control, not just those focused on youth, it characterized the overarching goal of reducing smoking as involving three distinct steps: “reducing the rate of initiation of smoking among youth (IOM [ Lynch and Bonnie] 1994 ), reducing involuntary tobacco smoke exposure ( National Research Council 1986 ), and helping people quit smoking” (p. 3). Thus, reducing onset was seen as one of the primary goals of tobacco control.

As part of USDHHS continuing efforts to assess the health of the nation, prevent disease, and promote health, the department released, in 2000, Healthy People 2010 and, in 2010, Healthy People 2020 ( USDHHS 2000a , 2011 ). Healthy People provides science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of all Americans. For 3 decades, Healthy People has established benchmarks and monitored progress over time in order to encourage collaborations across sectors, guide individuals toward making informed health decisions, and measure the impact of prevention activities. Each iteration of Healthy People serves as the nation’s disease prevention and health promotion roadmap for the decade. Both Healthy People 2010 and Healthy People 2020 highlight “Tobacco Use” as one of the nation’s “Leading Health Indicators,” feature “Tobacco Use” as one of its topic areas, and identify specific measurable tobacco-related objectives and targets for the nation to strive for. Healthy People 2010 and Healthy People 2020 provide tobacco objectives based on the most current science and detailed population-based data to drive action, assess tobacco use among young people, and identify racial and ethnic disparities. Additionally, many of the Healthy People 2010 and 2020 tobacco objectives address reductions of tobacco use among youth and target decreases in tobacco advertising in venues most often influencing young people. A complete list of the healthy people 2020 objectives can be found on their Web site ( USDHHS 2011 ).

In addition, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health has published monographs pertinent to the topic of tobacco use among youth. In 2001, NCI published Monograph 14, Changing Adolescent Smoking Prevalence , which reviewed data on smoking among youth in the 1990s, highlighted important statewide intervention programs, presented data on the influence of marketing by the tobacco industry and the pricing of cigarettes, and examined differences in smoking by racial/ethnic subgroup ( NCI 2001 ). In 2008, NCI published Monograph 19, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use ( NCI 2008 ). Although young people were not the sole focus of this Monograph, the causal relationship between tobacco advertising and promotion and increased tobacco use, the impact on youth of depictions of smoking in movies, and the success of media campaigns in reducing youth tobacco use were highlighted as major conclusions of the report.

The Community Preventive Services Task Force (2011) provides evidence-based recommendations about community preventive services, programs, and policies on a range of topics including tobacco use prevention and cessation ( Task Force on Community Preventive Services 2001 , 2005 ). Evidence reviews addressing interventions to reduce tobacco use initiation and restricting minors’ access to tobacco products were cited and used to inform the reviews in the current report. The Cochrane Collaboration (2010) has also substantially contributed to the review literature on youth and tobacco use by producing relevant systematic assessments of health-related programs and interventions. Relevant to this Surgeon General’s report are Cochrane reviews on interventions using mass media ( Sowden 1998 ), community interventions to prevent smoking ( Sowden and Stead 2003 ), the effects of advertising and promotional activities on smoking among youth ( Lovato et al. 2003 , 2011 ), preventing tobacco sales to minors ( Stead and Lancaster 2005 ), school-based programs ( Thomas and Perara 2006 ), programs for young people to quit using tobacco ( Grimshaw and Stanton 2006 ), and family programs for preventing smoking by youth ( Thomas et al. 2007 ). These reviews have been cited throughout the current report when appropriate.

In summary, substantial new research has added to our knowledge and understanding of tobacco use and control as it relates to youth since the 1994 Surgeon General’s report, including updates and new data in subsequent Surgeon General’s reports, in IOM reports, in NCI Monographs, and in Cochrane Collaboration reviews, in addition to hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, policy reports, and systematic reviews. Although this report is a follow-up to the 1994 report, other important reviews have been undertaken in the past 18 years and have served to fill the gap during an especially active and important time in research on tobacco control among youth.

Focus of the Report

Young People

This report focuses on “young people.” In general, work was reviewed on the health consequences, epidemiology, etiology, reduction, and prevention of tobacco use for those in the young adolescent (11–14 years of age), adolescent (15–17 years of age), and young adult (18–25 years of age) age groups. When possible, an effort was made to be specific about the age group to which a particular analysis, study, or conclusion applies. Because hundreds of articles, books, and reports were reviewed, however, there are, unavoidably, inconsistencies in the terminology used. “Adolescents,” “children,” and “youth” are used mostly interchangeably throughout this report. In general, this group encompasses those 11–17 years of age, although “children” is a more general term that will include those younger than 11 years of age. Generally, those who are 18–25 years old are considered young adults (even though, developmentally, the period between 18–20 years of age is often labeled late adolescence), and those 26 years of age or older are considered adults.

In addition, it is important to note that the report is concerned with active smoking or use of smokeless tobacco on the part of the young person. The report does not consider young people’s exposure to secondhand smoke, also referred to as involuntary or passive smoking, which was discussed in the 2006 report of the Surgeon General ( USDHHS 2006 ). Additionally, the report does not discuss research on children younger than 11 years old; there is very little evidence of tobacco use in the United States by children younger than 11 years of age, and although there may be some predictors of later tobacco use in those younger years, the research on active tobacco use among youth has been focused on those 11 years of age and older.

Tobacco Use

Although cigarette smoking is the most common form of tobacco use in the United States, this report focuses on other forms as well, such as using smokeless tobacco (including chew and snuff) and smoking a product other than a cigarette, such as a pipe, cigar, or bidi (tobacco wrapped in tendu leaves). Because for young people the use of one form of tobacco has been associated with use of other tobacco products, it is particularly important to monitor all forms of tobacco use in this age group. The term “tobacco use” in this report indicates use of any tobacco product. When the word “smoking” is used alone, it refers to cigarette smoking.

Organization of the Report

This chapter begins by providing a short synopsis of other reports that have addressed smoking among youth and, after listing the major conclusions of this report, will end by presenting conclusions specific to each chapter. Chapter 2 of this report (“The Health Consequences of Tobacco Use Among Young People”) focuses on the diseases caused by early tobacco use, the addiction process, the relation of body weight to smoking, respiratory and pulmonary problems associated with tobacco use, and cardiovascular effects. Chapter 3 (“The Epidemiology of Tobacco Use Among Young People in the United States and Worldwide”) provides recent and long-term cross-sectional and longitudinal data on cigarette smoking, use of smokeless tobacco, and the use of other tobacco products by young people, by racial/ethnic group and gender, primarily in the United States, but including some worldwide data as well. Chapter 4 (“Social, Environmental, Cognitive, and Genetic Influences on the Use of Tobacco Among Youth”) identifies the primary risk factors associated with tobacco use among youth at four levels, including the larger social and physical environments, smaller social groups, cognitive factors, and genetics and neurobiology. Chapter 5 (“The Tobacco Industry’s Influences on the Use of Tobacco Among Youth”) includes data on marketing expenditures for the tobacco industry over time and by category, the effects of cigarette advertising and promotional activities on young people’s smoking, the effects of price and packaging on use, the use of the Internet and movies to market tobacco products, and an evaluation of efforts by the tobacco industry to prevent tobacco use among young people. Chapter 6 (“Efforts to Prevent and Reduce Tobacco Use Among Young People”) provides evidence on the effectiveness of family-based, clinic-based, and school-based programs, mass media campaigns, regulatory and legislative approaches, increased cigarette prices, and community and statewide efforts in the fight against tobacco use among youth. Chapter 7 (“A Vision for Ending the Tobacco Epidemic”) points to next steps in preventing and reducing tobacco use among young people.

Preparation of the Report

This report of the Surgeon General was prepared by the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH), National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USDHHS. In 2008, 18 external independent scientists reviewed the 1994 report and suggested areas to be added and updated. These scientists also suggested chapter editors and a senior scientific editor, who were contacted by OSH. Each chapter editor named external scientists who could contribute, and 33 content experts prepared draft sections. The draft sections were consolidated into chapters by the chapter editors and then reviewed by the senior scientific editor, with technical editing performed by CDC. The chapters were sent individually to 34 peer reviewers who are experts in the areas covered and who reviewed the chapters for scientific accuracy and comprehensiveness. The entire manuscript was then sent to more than 25 external senior scientists who reviewed the science of the entire document. After each review cycle, the drafts were revised by the chapter and senior scientific editor on the basis of the experts’ comments. Subsequently, the report was reviewed by various agencies within USDHHS. Publication lags prevent up-to-the-minute inclusion of all recently published articles and data, and so some more recent publications may not be cited in this report.

Evaluation of the Evidence

Since the first Surgeon General’s report in 1964 on smoking and health ( USDHEW 1964 ), major conclusions concerning the conditions and diseases caused by cigarette smoking and the use of smokeless tobacco have been based on explicit criteria for causal inference ( USDHHS 2004 ). Although a number of different criteria have been proposed for causal inference since the 1960s, this report focuses on the five commonly accepted criteria that were used in the original 1964 report and that are discussed in greater detail in the 2004 report on the health consequences of smoking ( USDHHS 2004 ). The five criteria refer to the examination of the association between two variables, such as a risk factor (e.g., smoking) and an outcome (e.g., lung cancer). Causal inference between these variables is based on (1) the consistency of the association across multiple studies; this is the persistent finding of an association in different persons, places, circumstances, and times; (2) the degree of the strength of association, that is, the magnitude and statistical significance of the association in multiple studies; (3) the specificity of the association to clearly demonstrate that tobacco use is robustly associated with the condition, even if tobacco use has multiple effects and multiple causes exist for the condition; (4) the temporal relationship of the association so that tobacco use precedes disease onset; and (5) the coherence of the association, that is, the argument that the association makes scientific sense, given data from other sources and understanding of biological and psychosocial mechanisms ( USDHHS 2004 ). Since the 2004 Surgeon General’s report, The Health Consequences of Smoking , a four-level hierarchy ( Table 1.1 ) has been used to assess the research data on associations discussed in these reports ( USDHHS 2004 ). In general, this assessment was done by the chapter editors and then reviewed as appropriate by peer reviewers, senior scientists, and the scientific editors. For a relationship to be considered sufficient to be characterized as causal, multiple studies over time provided evidence in support of each criteria.

Four-level hierarchy for classifying the strength of causal inferences based on available evidence.

When a causal association is presented in the chapter conclusions in this report, these four levels are used to describe the strength of the evidence of the association, from causal (1) to not causal (4). Within the report, other terms are used to discuss the evidence to date (i.e., mixed, limited, and equivocal evidence), which generally represent an inadequacy of data to inform a conclusion.

However, an assessment of a casual relationship is not utilized in presenting all of the report’s conclusions. The major conclusions are written to be important summary statements that are easily understood by those reading the report. Some conclusions, particularly those found in Chapter 3 (epidemiology), provide observations and data related to tobacco use among young people, and are generally not examinations of causal relationships. For those conclusions that are written using the hierarchy above, a careful and extensive review of the literature has been undertaken for this report, based on the accepted causal criteria ( USDHHS 2004 ). Evidence that was characterized as Level 1 or Level 2 was prioritized for inclusion as chapter conclusions.

In additional to causal inferences, statistical estimation and hypothesis testing of associations are presented. For example, confidence intervals have been added to the tables in the chapter on the epidemiology of youth tobacco use (see Chapter 3 ), and statistical testing has been conducted for that chapter when appropriate. The chapter on efforts to prevent tobacco use discusses the relative improvement in tobacco use rates when implementing one type of program (or policy) versus a control program. Statistical methods, including meta-analytic methods and longitudinal trajectory analyses, are also presented to ensure that the methods of evaluating data are up to date with the current cutting-edge research that has been reviewed. Regardless of the methods used to assess significance, the five causal criteria discussed above were applied in developing the conclusions of each chapter and the report.

Major Conclusions
Cigarette smoking by youth and young adults has immediate adverse health consequences, including addiction, and accelerates the development of chronic diseases across the full life course.
Prevention efforts must focus on both adolescents and young adults because among adults who become daily smokers, nearly all first use of cigarettes occurs by 18 years of age (88%), with 99% of first use by 26 years of age.
Advertising and promotional activities by tobacco companies have been shown to cause the onset and continuation of smoking among adolescents and young adults.
After years of steady progress, declines in the use of tobacco by youth and young adults have slowed for cigarette smoking and stalled for smokeless tobacco use.
Coordinated, multicomponent interventions that combine mass media campaigns, price increases including those that result from tax increases, school-based policies and programs, and statewide or community-wide changes in smoke-free policies and norms are effective in reducing the initiation, prevalence, and intensity of smoking among youth and young adults.
Chapter Conclusions

The following are the conclusions presented in the substantive chapters of this report.

Chapter 2. The Health Consequences of Tobacco Use Among Young People

The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between smoking and addiction to nicotine, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood.
The evidence is suggestive but not sufficient to conclude that smoking contributes to future use of marijuana and other illicit drugs.
The evidence is suggestive but not sufficient to conclude that smoking by adolescents and young adults is not associated with significant weight loss, contrary to young people’s beliefs.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between active smoking and both reduced lung function and impaired lung growth during childhood and adolescence.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between active smoking and wheezing severe enough to be diagnosed as asthma in susceptible child and adolescent populations.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between smoking in adolescence and young adulthood and early abdominal aortic atherosclerosis in young adults.
The evidence is suggestive but not sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between smoking in adolescence and young adulthood and coronary artery atherosclerosis in adulthood.

Chapter 3. The Epidemiology of Tobacco Use Among Young People in the United States and Worldwide

Among adults who become daily smokers, nearly all first use of cigarettes occurs by 18 years of age (88%), with 99% of first use by 26 years of age.
Almost one in four high school seniors is a current (in the past 30 days) cigarette smoker, compared with one in three young adults and one in five adults. About 1 in 10 high school senior males is a current smokeless tobacco user, and about 1 in 5 high school senior males is a current cigar smoker.
Among adolescents and young adults, cigarette smoking declined from the late 1990s, particularly after the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998. This decline has slowed in recent years, however.
Significant disparities in tobacco use remain among young people nationwide. The prevalence of cigarette smoking is highest among American Indians and Alaska Natives, followed by Whites and Hispanics, and then Asians and Blacks. The prevalence of cigarette smoking is also highest among lower socioeconomic status youth.
Use of smokeless tobacco and cigars declined in the late 1990s, but the declines appear to have stalled in the last 5 years. The latest data show the use of smokeless tobacco is increasing among White high school males, and cigar smoking may be increasing among Black high school females.
Concurrent use of multiple tobacco products is prevalent among youth. Among those who use tobacco, nearly one-third of high school females and more than one-half of high school males report using more than one tobacco product in the last 30 days.
Rates of tobacco use remain low among girls relative to boys in many developing countries, however, the gender gap between adolescent females and males is narrow in many countries around the globe.

Chapter 4. Social, Environmental, Cognitive, and Genetic Influences on the Use of Tobacco Among Youth

Given their developmental stage, adolescents and young adults are uniquely susceptible to social and environmental influences to use tobacco.
Socioeconomic factors and educational attainment influence the development of youth smoking behavior. The adolescents most likely to begin to use tobacco and progress to regular use are those who have lower academic achievement.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between peer group social influences and the initiation and maintenance of smoking behaviors during adolescence.
Affective processes play an important role in youth smoking behavior, with a strong association between youth smoking and negative affect.
The evidence is suggestive that tobacco use is a heritable trait, more so for regular use than for onset. The expression of genetic risk for smoking among young people may be moderated by small-group and larger social-environmental factors.

Chapter 5. The Tobacco Industry’s Influences on the Use of Tobacco Among Youth

In 2008, tobacco companies spent $9.94 billion on the marketing of cigarettes and $547 million on the marketing of smokeless tobacco. Spending on cigarette marketing is 48% higher than in 1998, the year of the Master Settlement Agreement. Expenditures for marketing smokeless tobacco are 277% higher than in 1998.
Tobacco company expenditures have become increasingly concentrated on marketing efforts that reduce the prices of targeted tobacco products. Such expenditures accounted for approximately 84% of cigarette marketing and more than 77% of the marketing of smokeless tobacco products in 2008.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between advertising and promotional efforts of the tobacco companies and the initiation and progression of tobacco use among young people.
The evidence is suggestive but not sufficient to conclude that tobacco companies have changed the packaging and design of their products in ways that have increased these products’ appeal to adolescents and young adults.
The tobacco companies’ activities and programs for the prevention of youth smoking have not demonstrated an impact on the initiation or prevalence of smoking among young people.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young people.

Chapter 6. Efforts to Prevent and Reduce Tobacco Use Among Young People

The evidence is sufficient to conclude that mass media campaigns, comprehensive community programs, and comprehensive statewide tobacco control programs can prevent the initiation of tobacco use and reduce its prevalence among youth.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that increases in cigarette prices reduce the initiation, prevalence, and intensity of smoking among youth and young adults.
The evidence is sufficient to conclude that school-based programs with evidence of effectiveness, containing specific components, can produce at least short-term effects and reduce the prevalence of tobacco use among school-aged youth.
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Cite this Page National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (US) Office on Smoking and Health. Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US); 2012. 1, Introduction, Summary, and Conclusions.
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Importance of Quitting Smoking Essay

Smoking is a practice which involves the burning of a substance, for instance tobacco or cannabis, and later the smoke that emanates from it is inhaled. When referring to smoking, many people refer to tobacco smoking or cigarette smoking. The most widely used substance for smoking is tobacco, which is manufactured as cigarettes or hand-rolled tobacco. Smoking is an addictive habit and most smokers would attest that they wish they were able to stop the habit.

As much as it may seem to be a comfortable habit, smoking is in its actual sense not pleasurable and in any case it does not bring any relief. It is therefore the desire of many smokers to quit smoking. The knowledge that smoking can lead to serious health problems is one that is conscious in every smoker. This may make the smoker stay worried yet overcoming the addiction is a problem.

As such, quitting smoking is important since it helps relief the worry and the fear associated with possibility of developing cancer among other smoking-related illnesses. The smell that comes with smoking is very embarrassing and most people hate it.

Quitting smoking is therefore an important way of regaining self confidence by doing away with the embarrassing smell of cigarette smoke. Quitting smoking is an important way of shedding off the worry of the constant coughs and short breath brought about by smoking (Quit Smoking Review para 2-3).

Quitting smoking comes with a myriad of benefits which place more weight on the importance of quitting this addictive habit. If one quits smoking, it is no doubt that someone else is also saved from the problem of chain smoking. It is important that smokers reconsider their actions and identify that they spread the negative effects of smoking to persons who would not like to smoke.

It is therefore important to quit smoking if the problems associated with chain smoking are to be solved. The unborn are also beneficiaries of quitting smoking, especially among pregnant mothers. The elimination of very dangerous chemicals from the body motivates many people to avoid the practice. Most smokers thus find the health benefits as an encouraging gesture to quit smoking.

Quitting smoking is important since it leads to saving of monies that would have been used to buy cigarettes. These daily savings resulting from quitting smoking can be put into wiser and productive ways such as helping the family to settle bills as well as saving the money for investing. The fact that every individual’s lifestyle seems to influence another person’s life is an important reason why it is advisable to quit smoking. For instance, parents can act as good role models to their children by choosing to quit smoking.

In such a case, children are able to appreciate that smoking is a harmful habit and they will view the parent as a proactive parent as far as achieving good health is concerned. Additionally, quitting smoking gives the individual whiter and good looking teeth coupled with a fresh breath (Quit Smoking Review para 4-5). Most smokers are prone to gum diseases among other mouth diseases in comparison to non-smokers.

The individual’s health is also greatly improved as the breathing system that was once clogged with tobacco particles becomes clear and the lung capacity improves generally by about 10% (Gilman & Xun 45). Young smokers may not experience the negative effects of smoking until their later years but lung capacity generally weakens and diminishes with age.

Further, quitting smoking increases the individual’s life span, as Gilman and Xun (51) notes that half of all long-term smokers die from smoking related diseases such as heart attacks, lung cancer and others such as chronic bronchitis.

Those who quit smoking at age 30 are at an advantage as they add almost 10 years of their life span. As earlier mentioned stress levels are lower after one quits smoking since one has overcome the annoying habit. Most smokers suffer from withdrawal effects especially from nicotine, and the pleasant feeling of satisfying a craving is very temporary. Thus, non-smokers can concentrate better than smokers.

The body senses are also improved to a great extent as the system gets rid of many toxic chemicals found in the body as a result of cigarette smoke. Additionally, the individual experiences more energy as two weeks after quitting smoking, the circulation improves making many physical activities much easier. Additionally, the immune system is improved as mild diseases such as flu, colds and headaches can be easily fought.

In general, quitting smoking is an important step towards realizing an overall improvement in quality of life. Quitting smoking is also an important measure of ensuring cleanliness in one’s environment (American Academy of Family Physicians para 6).

Once one has quit smoking, the cigarette butts and ashes that are common in houses or cars of the smoker are no longer seen. This leads to greater happiness to the individual as well as those who live with the smoker. In addition, there is no need to worry much over the possible fire outbreaks brought about by careless disposal of burning cigarette butts.

Works Cited

American Academy of Family Physicians. Do I want to quit smoking ? 2000. Web.

Gilman, Sander and Xun, Zhou. Smoke: A global history of smoking . London, UK: Reaktion Books. 2004. Print.

Quit Smoking Review. The importance of quitting smoking . Web.

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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Keith Humphreys

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Keith Humphreys. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws

The war on drugs failed, but decriminalization is facing its own backlash. what’s next.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

In 2020, voters in Oregon passed a ballot measure, a drug reform policy, that was beyond what I ever thought would pass in any state in America.

Overnight, Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize most street drugs.

Even drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth, and oxycodone.

It’s a sea change. Measure 110, which was passed by 58 percent of Oregon voters, treats active drug users as potential patients rather than criminals.

I’ve been involved in drug policy reform for a long time. I got into it in high school. And this was not a politics that seemed possible back then. In that era, the idea that you would have a state decriminalize heroin possession, I mean, it was unthinkable. But in the coming decades, there would be a real turn on the war on drugs — the overpolicing, the mass incarceration, the racism, the broken families. It was not achieving, as far as anybody could tell, anybody’s policy goals.

So we began to move in this other direction. Oregon was at the vanguard of this, but it wasn’t alone. In Washington state, you saw the Supreme Court overturn the law that had made a lot of drug possessions and felonies. In a bunch of different cities, you had these very liberal district attorneys who instead of running on tough on crime platforms were running against overpolicing, against mass incarceration.

Something that had really never been tried before in America was all of a sudden being tried. We were moving towards a radically different equilibrium than anybody had imagined even just a few years before on drugs. I mean, you could walk down the streets — you can right now in many states — and buy all kinds of cannabis products from shops. It was, again, unthinkable.

But this politics and these policies are not working out the way people had hoped. Chesa Boudin, who was the district attorney in San Francisco, one of these very liberal set of reformers, he was recalled. Legislation was passed rebuilding an enforcement structure around drugs in Washington state. There are a lot of concerns and, I think, quite bright ones about how cannabis legalization and particularly cannabis commercialization is working out in a bunch of places.

And in Oregon, Measure 110 was gutted. The results of it had not been what many of the advocates had hoped for. Drug policy feels very unsettled to me right now. The war on drugs was a failure, often a cruel one. The war on the war on drugs has not been the success its advocates had hoped. So what comes next?

Keith Humphreys is a professor at Stanford University who specializes in addiction and drug policy. He’s advised the White House, California, the UK. I always find that he balances compassion and rigor unusually well. So I wanted to have him walk me through what he has seen and where he’s landed. As always, my email for guest suggestions, for reflections, [email protected].

Keith Humphreys, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ezra. Good to talk to you.

There’s a tendency to just use this term “drugs.” And that tendency just belies a huge amount of variation, I think, in how people think about different drugs, how they think about opioids, how they think about stimulants, how they think about psychedelics, how they think about cannabis, alcohol, caffeine. Is this a useful term?

So “drug” is an incredibly vague term that covers an enormous number of drugs that have very different properties. The biggest one, I think, is the capacity to instill addiction. People don’t get addicted to LSD, for example. But they do get addicted to heroin. That’s really important. They do get addicted to nicotine. That’s really important. So you would think about those drugs differently, the ones that have the ability to generate an illness with obsessive compulsion to use in the face of destructive consequences over and over and over again. Those belong in their own class, I think.

The second thing is that we should stop pretending that legal and illegal drugs are so different for lots of reasons. We could learn much more about what to do with illegal drugs if we looked at legal drugs. When I talk to policymakers, they say, well, I know what I don’t want. And that’s a carceral, racist war on drugs. I say, OK, I’m glad that option is off the table. That, of course, leaves millions and millions of other options to choose from.

And how some people have framed that is there’s really only two choices here. You can have that, that horrible thing. Or you can throw the switch the other way — tolerance, acceptance, public sale. And that’s going to be better.

And the problem with that argument, even before we get into what happened in places like Oregon, is the number one drug that kills people on the planet is cigarettes. The number one drug associated with arrests, violence, and incarceration is alcohol. Those drugs are legal. It’s not that drugs suddenly become easy to deal with once they’re legal.

You get to pick the set of problems you have, as our mutual friend Mark Kleiman used to say. But you don’t get to get rid of those problems. So people are right to identify substantial costs to prohibition of drugs or for that matter of everything. But that is different than saying there is some other framework that doesn’t also include pretty substantial costs.

So this major drug policy reform went into effect in Oregon in 2021, Measure 110. It passes. What happens next?

Part of what happens is exactly what the reformers hoped would happen, which is that there’s a dramatic drop in arrests — arrests for drug possession and arrests for drug dealing. So they say, wow, that’s a victory. On the other hand, some of the other aspects of it didn’t work out the way people planned.

So there was a system that they thought would encourage people to enter treatment in replacement of criminal penalties. You’d be written a ticket, let’s say, if you were using fentanyl on a park bench. And it said there’s $100 fine for doing this, but you don’t have to pay the fine. All you have to do is call this toll free number, and you can get a health assessment and a potential referral to treatment. Well, it turned out that over 95 percent of the people got those tickets simply threw them away, which, keeping with the spirit of the law, there was no consequence for doing that. Hardly anybody called. The new body they set up to distribute the new funds had very serious management problems because the people — they may have been terrific human beings, but they weren’t actually experienced in how do you run a government bureaucracy.

So there was no real improvement in the availability of treatment, no real improvement in the number of people interested in seeking it. And those things may well have contributed to Oregon having a very high overdose rate. So currently going up about 40 percent per year, 4-0. Of course, some of that is due to fentanyl, which is raising — I’m here in California. Our rate’s up 5 percent, but it’s certainly not up 40 percent.

And the last thing is the intangible. And I say this as someone who goes to Oregon a lot and talks to people there almost every week, which is just the change in neighborhoods was really palpable of what it was like to go out in the street or try to go to a park, how much visible drug use you saw, how much disorder connected to it. And this was accentuated even further by the pandemic. There were fewer people on the street who had the choice. So the experience became more frightening as people were perhaps outnumbered in their neighborhood by people who had clearly visible problems were using drugs. And that generated significant and, I think, understandable upset as to how things were going in Oregon.

So not everybody agrees that Measure 110 was a failure, certainly not as a policy. I mean, it definitely failed politically. The Drug Policy Alliance says that it failed because of disinformation because there was a concerted effort to undermine it. And they cite data from the Oregon Health Authority saying that, look, health needs screenings increased by almost 300 percent. Substance use disorder treatment increased by 143 percent. Is there some argument to this that we’re looking at the wrong measures and, judged according to its goals, 110 was actually kind of working?

If what you care about the most was a drop in drug arrests and involvement of people who use drugs and deal drugs in the criminal justice system, then it was a success clearly because there was very little contact anymore between law enforcement and people who sell and deal drugs. But on the health side, no, I don’t think that. And those statistics on treatment I believe count a lot of one time consultations. I think what most people, particularly people who love someone who has an addiction, are looking for is evidence on people getting better, people getting into recovery, not just at some point having some transitory contact with the system.

There’s another argument that’s made in the Drug Policy Alliance document and other things I’ve seen and that has occurred to me, too, because when I think about Oregon, when I think about San Francisco, when I think about Washington State, I mean, you’re talking about places with very broken housing markets. We’ll talk I’m sure more about the Tenderloin.

But the Tenderloin is dystopic in the way the Tenderloin is dystopic because it is a giant homeless encampment. And that was true well before the current wave of drug policy liberalization. And so one argument here is that the drug system is being blamed for policymakers’ inability to solve these other problems. Is there something to that?

There’s an intense argument out here in the Bay Area between people who say, look, the homeless crisis is just a side effect of addiction. And people say, look, the addiction crisis is just a side effect of homelessness. And I would say they’re both wrong in that, even within my personal group of acquaintances, I know people who lost their home because of an addiction. And it’s not that the housing market discharged them, they had an empty property. But they were out on the streets. And then there are people who lost their housing and then were living next to drug markets on the streets and developed an addiction there.

So I don’t think we can separate that Gordian knot. And I don’t know if in policy terms we have to. I mean, I think we should be able to pursue policies that increase the access to housing and still work on policies that reduce the damage from addiction.

So to go back to Oregon and one of the theories that was operating there was that we’re going to move more money into treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer in the sense that you will not be arrested for seeking treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer for you to seek treatment. We’re going to make it cheap to seek treatment. Why didn’t more people seek treatment?

That theory reflects a misunderstanding about the nature of addiction, which is that it is like, say, chronic pain or depression, conditions that feel lousy for the person who has them all day long, and they will do anything to get rid of them. Drug addiction is not like that. It has many painful experiences. It destroys people’s lives.

But drug use feels in the short term incredibly good. That is why people do it. They’re getting intense reward. So they are ambivalent about giving that up in a way no one with chronic pain is ambivalent about giving up chronic pain and no one with depression is ambivalent about giving up depression.

The other point about it is a huge number of the problems from drug use and addiction fall on other people rather than the person concerned. And so people like me who work in this field, we get calls and calls and calls from mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children concerned about their loved ones. But it’s very rare we get a call from somebody concerned about their own use.

Take the law out of it and look at a drug that is legal and widely accepted. Studies of people who seek treatment for an alcohol problem, slightly over 9 in 10 of those people say they were pressured to come. And the pressure might be family pressure, mom and dad said or my spouse said, this keeps up, I’m moving out. The boss said, one more day drunk at work, and you’re fired. Doctor said, you keep doing this, you will be dead in six months. It could be this is your fourth or fifth arrest for drunk driving, and your lawyer says, you better get into treatment because the judge otherwise might throw you in the penitentiary. That is overwhelmingly the situation of people seeking treatment — pressure from outside.

So let’s just remove all pressure. No legal pressure, no disapproval. Then people will spontaneously say, OK, I really want to make a change, and I’ll come in. Look, those of us who do this for a living, we pray for patients like that. It’s great when they come in, but that is just a very rare person.

Let me ask about this from the other direction, which is maybe this all just wasn’t nearly liberal enough because one of the arguments made — and I do think there’s evidence behind it — is people are getting stuff they don’t know. And the reason people die from fentanyl laced heroin or simply fentanyl that they thought was heroin is because they don’t have a source they can trust. Part of the difficulty here is, yes, people end up addicted. We don’t have really good treatments for addiction that we can come back to whether you think that is a true claim.

And then we also make it very difficult for people and dangerous for people to get what they need to avoid withdrawal to keep feeling normal. And if we made that easier on them, if we made it so they didn’t have to go to a place like the Tenderloin and instead get something safe, they would not die from overdose. They would not die from fentanyl laced heroin. Is there validity to that?

Yeah, well, certainly using fentanyl in an illicit market is extraordinarily dangerous. And my colleagues and I are trying to figure out the death rate per year of a regular user. It might be as high as 5 percent. So that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do.

And the arguments you’re making have been influential in this region to the point that if you go up slightly even further in the Pacific Northwest into Canada and British Columbia, they’ve gone so far to say it’s the government’s job to supply these drugs because prohibition makes things more dangerous, so we have a positive obligation to do this. But the problem with that reasoning is we did flood communities with legally made, consistent quality, clearly labeled opioids for years. And the net effect was millions of people getting addicted and hundreds of thousands of people dying.

That’s, in fact, how we got here. I think everyone knows what OxyContin is, all the other opioids that were really pushed out there. So it’s just really hard to sustain that argument that at a population level, huge access to addictive drugs is not going to cause a lot of addiction and overdose as long as they’re clearly labeled and of consistent quality. If that were true, we would never had an opioid crisis.

So Measure 110 passes in 2020. It goes into effect in 2021. What happens to it in 2023?

At that point, overdoses were way up. And popular sentiment has shifted pretty dramatically. I think quite a few people felt burned. They hadn’t gotten what they’d been promised. And that included people who, for example, had relatives who were addicted who they assume would be getting into treatment and recovery and then weren’t able to get services.

Neighborhoods are decaying. Polling showed that about two thirds of the Oregon population wanted Measure 110 repealed in part or in whole. And interestingly, those sentiments were even stronger among Black and Hispanic Oregon residents.

In response to all this, both Houses by very large margins replaced Measure 110 with a different approach to drug policy. It restored the ability to impose criminal penalties, to use those penalties particularly to leverage people to change their behavior — for example, by restoring drug courts and other kinds of diversion and monitoring programs. It is definitely not correct to say they reinstated the war on drugs because, it has to be remembered, Oregon never really had a war on drugs policy. They were the first state in the nation to decriminalize marijuana over 50 years ago, in fact. They decriminalized marijuana. They had a very low rate of putting nonviolent criminals into prisons.

So it was more a restoration of that progressive, liberty loving approach that they’d had before but supplemented with a lot more funding for treatment, which is something they’ve had a lot of problems standing up for years, which had nothing to do with Measure 110. The treatment system was in very bad shape before Measure 110. And it still is.

If you’ve been around drug policy conversations for a long time, you’ll have heard a lot, I have heard a lot, about Portugal. And Portugal is a place where they decriminalized drugs. And it has been a much more sustainable, solid policy. So what is different about Portugal?

Portugal is different in policy and different in culture. So they definitely don’t throw people in prison, and it’s decriminalized. But they do have what are called dissuasion commissions that do assessments of people, say, who arrested in the street for using drugs. And you have to show up to this assessment. And they can push and nudge people to seek care.

And they can also apply penalties if they want to. They can say, you’re a cab driver. You’ve been caught using cocaine. And we’re going to take your cab license away until you seek treatment and stop using cocaine. Things like that. It is not a war on drugs approach, but it is a push in the policy. And that has never been taken on seriously by American advocates who cite Portugal.

Portugal also has a universal health care. We do not have that. We are the only developed Western country that doesn’t have that. So that makes it easier to get help irrespective of what the laws are. And Portugal had at least at the time of their decriminalization a very nice network of treatment services and harm reduction services for people. And all that together worked in the policy mix.

The other point is the culture of Portugal is much more family oriented. It’s much more communitarian than American general and certainly much more true than our freedom loving Libertarian Pacific Coast. If you spend time in Lisbon, you have a common experience of running into people and say, where are you born? And they’ll say, well, Lisbon. And where were your parents born? Lisbon. And they still live in my neighborhood. And my grandparents live in my neighborhood, too. You never hear this in San Francisco or Portland. Everybody is from somewhere else. And many people actually moved to the West to get away from everybody else, to get away from social constraints. I want to be my own person. Well, Portugal is the opposite of that.

So there’s a lot of constraint on behavior. It’s loving constraint, but it is constraint, those boundaries around people’s behavior that don’t exist out in the West with the exception of recent immigrant communities, which, by the way, have very low rates of drug problems.

This is something that I always think people underestimate at least about San Francisco, which is one of these cities under the best, which is that it is a culture of enormous tolerance. And that is a lot of what makes San Francisco remarkable, what has made it a home for L.G.B.T.Q. people when that was a very rare thing to be, what has made it open to all these weird ideas from computer scientists and strange nerds who came around with their thoughts about AI and their thoughts about visual operating systems.

And people don’t like necessarily the dark side of this open, tolerant, nonjudgmental way of looking at the world. There’s a bit of a divided soul, a difficulty judging, a discomfort with paternalism, and a kind of optimism that if you let subcultures have their freedom and grapple their way forward, they’ll find their way to an equilibrium and that we should be very, very, very skeptical of heavy handed particularly law enforcement as a way of changing culture.

That is a very nice description of the city we both love. And we’d be much poorer without San Francisco’s embrace of individual freedom and all the great things that it gives, which you just articulated. To me, the resolution here is taking addiction seriously as a problem.

So if you look at somebody who is using methamphetamine five times a day, you could say, well, that is really an expression of their individual freedom. I need to respect that. But if you recognize the likelihood that they are not particularly free because they are addicted, the inconsistency disappears. And so I feel personally no contradiction between saying the state should intervene with pressure — for example, mandating people into treatment. For me, that doesn’t conflict with individual freedom at all. So when I talked to somebody who said, look, you need to just let people do what they want, I say, look. I volunteer in the Tenderloin. And I carry naloxone, the overdose rescue medication, with me. If someone were in front of me in overdose and dying, should I administer naloxone even though the person can’t consent, they’re unconscious?

And I’ve never had anyone say, you’re right. You should just respect their right to die. They say, well, no, of course, you should do that, conceding the principle that there are times that the thing we can do the most to help other people is take care of them when they were not in a fit state to take care of themselves.

Is that a straw man, though? I can’t really think of people at least that I have heard arguing that somebody under the throes of heroin addiction is free and is choosing the life they live, that they’re likely to be happy with the world they now exist in.

One of the really striking things about this new rhetoric about drug policy out here is how rarely addiction is even mentioned. The fact that there’s so much focus on drug overdose, which is, of course, terrible, but that is treated as the only index and not addiction reflects a viewpoint that that’s not either an important thing or not that real a thing. Because if it were, you would note that in the heyday of wild opioid prescribing, there were fewer overdoses, but there were far more people who were addicted to those substances. And that made their lives dramatically worse.

I also see the lack of attention to addiction in the investment in harm reduction without the idea of using it as a springboard into treatment, which to me is a very novel idea that’s only become more powerful in the last couple of years where people feel like that in itself is the goal versus trying to eliminate addiction and get somebody into recovery.

So this is complicated, I think, because there’s this interaction in this period between what you might call elite and mass drug culture. In this period, you have the rise of a lot of super popular podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss, who are very open about their psychedelic use. You have Michael Pollan’s great book on psychedelics, “How to Change Your Mind.” I do a bunch of podcasts about psychedelics. You have a book by Carl Hart, who’s a well-known drug researcher at Columbia, called “Drug Use for Grownups” where he talks openly about using heroin to relax at the end of the day. Ketamine use rises in a very public way.

And so you have this change in drug culture among elites. It becomes much more acceptable to talk about how you use drugs to improve your life that I think also makes it look hypocritical to have a punitive approach not just legally but culturally towards other kinds of drug use. Do you think there’s something to that?

Yeah. I’ve seen that very much, too. And people with a platform, they’ve got a hearing. One of the most important things to understand about Measure 110, for example, is it passed easily. It was not that controversial as people thought it would be. And that elite change, I think, was part of the dynamic.

And definitely, you could see that in psychedelics in Oregon, which, as you know, has set up an entire system to administer psychedelics as a healing force. At least that’s the theory. These are transformative medicines often, by the way, in advance of evidence. But put that aside for a minute. And that is a remarkable change.

I think the criticism you could make of people who are well off and well resourced and have a lot of social capital and have access to treatment and health care whenever they need it is that they could be overgeneralizing what it’s like to use drugs in that situation versus the situation most people find themselves in with a lot less resources and a lot fewer things to catch them if they develop a problem. Now, some would say, well, the real problem is the law, and it’s the punishment you get and all that. And that can absolutely ruin people’s lives. There’s no question to that.

But there’s also quite a few people whose lives are ruined by drugs, including cannabis. There’s some people whose lives have been ruined by psychedelics and certainly people’s lives ruined by cocaine and fentanyl and so on. You don’t think about that much maybe when you are in a really comfy, well-resourced environment. But the average person who lives in a more typical environment does think about it, does have to worry about it. And that gives them a different understanding of what drugs are, how risky they are, and what they want their government to do about them.

That all makes sense to me. But something else I would say was here was that I would have described the consensus for a very long time as drug use is bad, and policing is good. And to some degree, by the time of 110 and some other reforms we were seeing in other states, I think that there was — and you can tell me if this tracks for you — a belief that drug use is somewhere between neutral and good depending on the drug, and policing is bad.

Yeah. There’s no way to separate what happened in Oregon from the murder of George Floyd and from Black Lives Matter. I mean, the protests against police were as intense in Oregon as anywhere they were in the United States and indeed throughout the region and a lot of concern — and it’s got to be said — a lot of justifiable concern about racism and policing. And a huge portion of that was focused on drug enforcement. And that flip was clearly part of why the bill passed.

In terms of drug use, I think there’s a split. I mean, so there are people who accept it’s a health matter. So let’s move to that part of the population, some of whom will say, it’s not a good idea, but we should add health services, and I certainly wouldn’t punish anybody for it, to people would say, no, it is good. In fact, it is actively good. Drug use is good. Drug use should be accepted and maybe even promoted or celebrated. And the debate has been, I think, between those two strands, whereas in the ‘80s, it was more between “drugs are bad — period” and “they should be legal even if they’re good or bad.”

You’ve written about billboards that I used to see and always thought were somewhat strange around fentanyl use and showing happy people — and these were in San Francisco — showing happy people and suggesting if you’re going to use this stuff, use it with friends. Use it around others. Make sure you’re not doing it alone.

One way of looking at them was as a destigmatization of this. It’s totally fine. Just be safe. And another way of looking at it was a total last gasp, but we don’t know what to do. We’re going to try this approach to everything else is failing. Maybe if we completely turn around our approach and just try to change the social dynamics in which people use, that might have an effect on the margin.

So several things there you’re saying, I think they’re important. One is, absolutely. In the face of all this death and all this suffering, we’re all desperate for solutions. And I think it is good that we are thinking in very fundamental ways about what the solutions are. That should be the case when you have this much suffering.

I think it is not irrelevant that these changes have unfolded during a pandemic where, let’s face it, we all went a little crazy. It was very stressful. It was emotional. Many policy debates took on a very personal cast. And we did rock between different extremes in our politics.

With the billboards — and just to describe these billboards, what to me is interesting about them is that the public health department signed off on these. And if they had been promoting beer, they would’ve been outraged by them because they would’ve said, well, you’re making it look like this is something young, attractive, successful people do. And it’s a lot of fun. And you’re understanding all the risk. And you’re going to be tempting kids. You’re basically giving people really bad information. But it wasn’t alcohol. It was fentanyl.

And so I guess they felt it was reasonable on the idea that this will destigmatize. And then people will be comfortable talking about it and using fentanyl together. And they would show people in the apartment having a nice party. Then they could take care of each other in the event of an overdose. It would be a social event, and then you could be there. To me, it’s an extraordinary chain of reasoning. But that’s where San Francisco got in 2021.

I lived in San Francisco during this period. It also had a highly liberalizing attitude on drugs. It had significant open air drug markets, particularly in the Tenderloin.

But what I always saw as the core thing that was infuriating people because I lived in places like D.C. that had a much higher murder rate but where crime was much less of an angry political issue was a feeling that the government was tolerating disorder, that it wasn’t fighting it and failing or fighting it and failing to triumph over what’s a very hard problem, but that the government was allowing it, that they were allowing these open air drug markets, that they were allowing people to shoot up on the street, and that it turned out the politics of permitting disorder were really, really, really bad.

Yes, they are. And I volunteer in the Tenderloin. So I’ve spent a lot of time in those neighborhoods and definitely pick up that sense. And, say, for a number of people would express it in an even harsher way, which is the government is tolerating it where I live in a way they would never tolerate it in a wealthier neighborhood. That could be coupled also with a sense of some of those people in the wealthier neighborhoods say this should be tolerated, but they’re not having to tolerate it. I am. And that generates understandable anger.

And this has had an interesting racial dimension in my observation of it is that a lot of this tolerance has been pushed in the name of racial justice often by white college educated progressives but is unpopular with many, many people of color who live in low income neighborhoods because they’re paying the cost of it while it’s being advocated for for people who they don’t even know who live in neighborhoods that don’t have these kinds of problems.

I was reading recently a lawsuit filed by residents of the Tenderloin against San Francisco. And it was saying in a way that is illegal and unconstitutional, it was alleging that San Francisco — and everybody knows this to be true — was not enforcing laws in the Tenderloin the way it was in other parts of the city, that it had settled on a containment strategy in the Tenderloin. And the Tenderloin is really rough for people who have not walked around there. I mean, the disorder, the despair, the difficulty’s incredibly visible. And one of the things that was noted in the lawsuit was that the Tenderloin has a much higher ratio of children than most parts of San Francisco. It has a lot of immigrant families, a lot of poor families. And so this is being tolerated where really a lot of kids were.

And the argument was that this was not allowed where richer people lived in San Francisco, and it was where these poorer people lived. And even knowing that, it was striking to see it laid out and to see these experiences of people who were living amidst it laid out and their fury that containment was being done on their backs.

Why are there hundreds of dealers standing on street corners in the Tenderloin and in the south of Market? They are not there to service the neighborhood. Because if you live in a neighborhood and your dealer lives in the neighborhood, your dealer doesn’t have to stand on a corner. You know each other. You can text. You can just stop by and make your transactions.

Open air markets are there to service strangers. They’re so that buyers and sellers can find each other really fast. And in an open air market, it’s serving people who don’t live in the neighborhood. There’s no reason there’d be that many dealers. The Tenderloin doesn’t need that many dealers to pay for its own drug use.

So it’s a legitimate gripe if you live in a neighborhood and you’re trying to raise a family in a neighborhood that is taken over by an open air market to say, we’re taking all the harms of all the drug use of the other neighborhoods where they don’t allow open air dealing. But people know they can just drive from there to here pick up their drugs and then go off about their way. And that’s unfair. And so I sympathize with the residents of the Tenderloin who are raising that very legitimate gripe about not getting equal protection under the law.

One question I’ve had about all this is how much of it is a set of policies that might’ve worked or certainly worked better than they did, but fentanyl rolled a grenade underneath this? I mean, a lot of this thinking was happening years before fentanyl just completely invaded America.

The emergence and dominance of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl among the opioids or super strong methamphetamine that is now a larger share of the market than cocaine has, I think, undermined basic assumptions about drug policy across the world. When a kind of person who might come into, say, a methadone clinic addicted to heroin, their heroin use might be once a day or maybe twice a day, including people who were holding jobs, people who still were in touch with their families. Not that life was going well, but there was some level of manageability. We now have people with fentanyl using 10, 20, 30 times a day. Their entire existence is — because fentanyl has a very short cycle of action.

So you wake up. You’re in withdrawal. Withdrawal is incredibly unpleasant. You may smoke fentanyl, smoke, smoke, smoke. Maybe it takes 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Your withdrawal finally stops. You smoke some more till you get high. You fall asleep. You wake up, and you’re in withdrawal. And you’re just really stuck like that.

And I see people like that. I mean, I’m very optimistic about the potential of recovery for addiction. Those are what I’ve seen. And those are also my values. I try to approach everybody that way.

And I also sometimes am frightened that it’s just much, much harder to help people in this state when their life is that consumed by drugs even relative to how consumed their lives were by drugs like heroin and OxyContin. It’s really pretty frightening. And we are getting it first. The United States and Canada too are being exposed to these drugs.

It’s interesting to note in Europe, they’re just starting to get these drugs. And whether they’ll keep with their same policy mix is a really interesting question. It isn’t entirely sure. I have a colleague who says fentanyl is like an antibiotic resistant infection. The stuff we always done that used to work doesn’t work anymore. And that’s terrifying.

How good now is our best gold standard addiction treatment?

So this varies a lot by drug. I’m going to start with the bad news first, which is the stimulants. So the biggest disappointment of my career is about cocaine and methamphetamine. I started my career in the late 1980s. And the care that people got for those drugs then is almost the same as what they get now. There’s been very little progress.

Billions have been spent. Brilliant people have tried to develop, for example, pharmacological treatments for them. Nothing has panned out yet. Most of the behavioral treatments don’t work. We have one thing that seems to work, which is contingency management, a particular way of structuring and giving rewards to help people make changes in their behavior. But we’ve had that for a very long time. So the news there is kind of disappointing.

For alcohol, funnily enough, one of the best things we have has been around forever, which is Alcoholics Anonymous. And for a long time, people in my field looked down on it as too folky and not medical enough. And yet there’s now tremendous evidence that myself and some colleagues assembled in what’s called a Cochrane Collaboration showing that does work, that people do, in fact, as well or better in Alcoholics Anonymous as they do coming to see people like myself.

There’s also some medications available. Acamprosate is one. Naltrexone is another. Some people benefit from those.

On the opioids, we have multiple approved FDA medications. Methadone has been around a very long time. It’s a substitute medication. It is effective for many people. Buprenorphine is another substitute medication, slightly different pharmacologically, but also effective for a great many people. And we have naltrexone, which is it works differently. It’s a blocking agent. And there are people who do very well on that.

So those things are all good. That’s considered the front line. You offer people medication first. And people also can benefit from other kinds of things — therapies and from residential care. And if somebody is out on the street with an addiction, it’s not believable that they are going to check in once a week for an hour with a therapist because their lives aren’t that organized. They usually need a safe substance free environment in which to stay. And those are often in short supply. So we sometimes don’t have success there not because we don’t know what to do, but because we haven’t allocated the resources to do it.

But how good are any of these? I mean, let’s zoom in on alcohol for a minute. I’ve known a lot of people — people I’ve loved — who have had very severe alcohol addictions. And you can’t be near that and not realize how differently different drugs act on different people. If I am drinking, just at some point, my body is like, that’s good. We’re done.

And there are people I know who they have burnt their life down around them. And they’ve been in and out of residential treatment. They’ve gone to A.A. Some people recover. Often they really don’t. How likely is it if you go into A.A. or some of these other things that you’ll recover?

People who seek for alcohol treatment or Alcoholics Anonymous can fall into three bins. If you look at them about 6 or 12 months later, somewhere between 40 percent, 50 percent are dramatically better off. Their lives are dramatically better. And that could be the completely abstinent, or they’re much more abstinent, but their lives are dramatically better.

Then there’s another group of people who seem to be somewhat better. That might be 20 percent, 25 percent. They’re still having significant problems. But maybe they make some things like, at least I’m not drinking and driving at the same time, or at least my spouse and I are making some progress in our marital communication. And then the remaining people unfortunately look exactly the same as the day they came into treatment. They either made no progress, or they made some slight progress and then relapsed.

The perception that we have of it tends to be driven by that last group. That’s because when people get better, they disappear into the woodwork. So when I worked in the White House, I used to think when I walked by somebody getting out of the metro who’s actively using drugs or alcohol, I’m very aware. That’s so visible to me.

And yet I know every day people walk by me in suits or in recovery, and I don’t notice them at all. Just looks like another Washington lawyer or civil servant or politician. So the cognitive effects of people who are doing the worst or the most vivid give us, I think, a more despairing view than we ought to have.

How much is the risk of developing an addiction genetic?

Genes affect us a lot. Studies across addictions show a genetic contribution. It varies by the substance, but at least 30 percent, sometimes even 50 percent. How much control people have just in general — some people are more impulsive than others, have a harder time thinking about the future than others from their first day on this Earth. And that will increase your risk for addiction.

If you’re very, very risk averse person who thinks a lot about the future, drug use looks differently to you than if you’re someone who wants to feel good today and is a happy go lucky person. Some of why we get addicted has to do with things that nobody can really control. And those can be things like liking. Even for the first time we use them, we like drugs differently.

When my boys were little, they were in the backyard, and they were climbing a tree. And I said, ah, that’s not how to climb a tree. I’ll show you how to climb a tree. So when I got to the emergency room, I said, this bone is broken. And I know it because I can see the way it’s knocked off my wrist.

And they nicely patched it for me. And they sent me home with Vicodin, the opioid Vicodin, bottle of 30, and said, it’s going to hurt. So you’re going to want to take these.

I take one. And I feel terrible. Stomach all feels bound up. I feel just really groggy. I don’t like this. For me, it was very easy to say pain is better than taking even one more of these pills. Meanwhile, I’ve treated people who say, the first time I had an opioid, it was like a hole that had been in my heart my whole life filled up for the first time.

Now, both those experiences are real. You cannot attribute them to, well, Keith must be a real solid and moral person, and that’s an immoral person, or Keith must have made good choices, and that person made bad choices, because we had no learning history at all. It was just the kismet of genetics that drugs feel differently to different people from the very first time, not just learning history.

And so I find it very easy to be sympathetic to someone who’s addicted to opioids because I think the reason I’m not going to do that is not because I’m a better person. It’s because they just don’t feel good to me. And to you, they felt fantastic. And so you were willing to keep on using them.

It’s not just that I find it easy to be sympathetic. But I find it hard to know how to think about it because, to be blunt, I’ve had very positive personal experiences with certain drugs. And at the same time, I’m somebody who is extremely nonaddictive in this area of my life. I have never wanted more puffs on a cigarette than I had. I’ve never smoked a cigarette and been like, I need another one. Obviously, other people I knew when I was in college, that was not how that went for them.

There is something here where, on the one hand, I worry that a fair amount of the discourse around drugs comes from people for whom maybe it actually is positive for them. There are people who have real positive relationships with different kinds of substances both legal and illegal. Adderall can be amazing for somebody with A.D.H.D., and it can be very destructive for somebody who ends up using it recreationally. I mean, you were talking about methamphetamines. And it’s not all that different.

And it becomes, I think, almost philosophically hard to know how to think about these substances that really can range. How to think about something where for some people it can be a very good part of their life, either pleasurable or even very profound. For other people, it can be a complete disaster that will actually ruin their life. And who are you making policy for and how feels like something that this conversation gets caught on a lot.

I agree, yeah, because drugs aren’t good, and drugs aren’t bad. They are good and bad. And sometimes I envy colleagues who work in areas like cholera prevention. If there’s a cholera outbreak, and you get rid of it, you’re a hero. Everybody loves you. Nobody says, but I was having a party. I need a little cholera. Can’t you keep a little cholera for special occasions? It’s like, no, everyone just hates cholera. Drugs are absolutely not like that. People have great experiences with drugs. I drink wine, by the way. That’s a drug. Or ethanol is a drug.

So we can’t resolve it that simply. And so we have to get into these questions of, well, when is it good? And when is it bad? And for whom is it good? And for whom is it bad?

And then there’s a question that is to me a philosophical question, in fact, religions grapple with, which is should I give something up for the benefit of others? Perhaps I can use fentanyl freely and enjoy it. But should I still say it shouldn’t be in recreational market because I’m aware enough of my fellow people would find it life ruining? And so the moral thing is for me to give it up so the sense that all of us can live together in a spirit of common humanity. And there’s always going to be tougher discussions, things that are good and bad versus things that are just clearly good, and we should just embrace them, and clearly bad and just reject them.

I wonder about this with the rollout of legal cannabis across a lot of the country. So this is something that I occasionally take. I’ll sometimes have a 5 milligram edible to help me sleep or to relax at the end of the night. It isn’t something I want all that often. And when I go into these stores, and I look in them, and I see the way they’re popping up in New York the way they popped up in California, it’s pretty clear this market is not catering to me.

And I think a lot about something that, as you mentioned, our mutual late friend Mark Kleiman, who was one of the great drug researchers and crime researchers, used to say to me, which is that alcohol companies do not make their money on people who drink a beer or two a week. They make their money on people who drink a case. And when I go into these stores, what I see are the rise of super high potency products that I wouldn’t touch. And clearly the money is being made given how many of the stores there are on people taking a lot more than I am a lot more often. When you look at what is going on with legal cannabis, how do you feel about it?

So start at the question of should we ever throw people in a cell for cannabis? Oh, so that was a terrible idea. So let’s take that off the table and just say if we’re going to have a legal industry, have we regulated it well? And I think it’s absolutely clear we have not.

And this is something we’re generally I’d say bad at relative to other countries of constraining profit when the profit damages public health. And so we have an industry with hardly any constraints on their products, not a very good record with even labeling their products accurately, very poor enforcement of even keeping the legal regime in place. And the pot shops in New York are a good example of that. A huge number of them are unlicensed and just doing whatever they want. And they’re being allowed to do that.

So I think we’ve done a really bad job with cannabis and in part driven by this phenomenon of not being willing to admit that cannabis isn’t good or bad, but it is both. And so when Mark Kleiman and I worked with Washington state, who was one of the first states to legalize, and we said, you still need to have some enforcement to make a licensing system work, I remember people literally either laughing or getting angry at us saying, the war on drugs is over. No more enforcement ever.

It’s like, actually, no. Why would you have a license and do the right thing and not hire minors? And why would you be sure to card? And why would you sell clean and safe products when you do that because you get a market advantage in a licensed market? And so if we just allow anybody to do anything, well, then there’s really no point in getting licensed, no point in paying your taxes, no point in being a good citizen, no point in not in hawking dangerous products.

And that’s the situation that we have. And we’re going to be really sorry for it. The distribution of consumption is also really important to think about. It’s not quite half, but it’s certainly a plurality of cannabis users today are using it every single day, usually a high strength product.

Wow, really? Almost half?

Yeah. I’d say about 40 percent are daily or near daily users. And so that’s where the money is if you’re running an industry. And so you want to produce cheap high-strength product that that population will use and use and use and use. And I just think we’re really going to regret that.

My friends over at “Search Engine,” which is a great podcast, just did this two part series on the New York cannabis market. And I had not really understood that while New York is now completely full of what appeared to me to be legal cannabis stores, virtually none of them are legal cannabis stores. There’s a very small number of legal ones and then a huge number of illegal ones.

And you might say, well, how are there all these illegal stores? And the answer is that nobody wants to send the police to bust people for cannabis. And so much of the theory of legalization as I understood it for years was that we will legalize and then be able to regulate the market. But if what we’ve done is legalized, but we’re not willing to use law enforcement, and so we cannot regulate the market, that’s actually a dramatically different policy equilibrium than I feel like I was promised.

Yeah, the experience you’re having — I think people have had across a lot of drug policy — is expecting one thing and then getting another and underestimating the ideological commitments of the people who designed it. So there are people who say, we’re going to have this legal market, and we’ll get rid of the illegal sellers and all that. But that isn’t what necessarily they wanted. They just thought, look, this should not be restricted at all. And you should just be able to deal with it and sell it and have a classic Libertarian understanding of it as opposed to a more progressive understanding of what we expect from industries. And this problem is replicated all over the country.

There’s also something that’s happened in policing, which is there’s always more to do for police than they have to do. So they’re not super interested in getting involved. Even with some of the massive problems we have, for example, here in California, we have huge illicit groves, some of them staffed by people who have literally been human trafficked. But it hasn’t really risen up as an enforcement priority because, cannabis, we don’t do that anymore.

You said this about cannabis, and I found it really striking. Quote, “The newly legal industry looks a lot like the tobacco industry — an under-regulated, under-taxed, politically connected, white dominated corporate entity that generates its profits mainly by addicting lower income people to a drug. 85 percent of Colorado’s cannabis, for example, is consumed by people who did not graduate from college.” Can you say a bit more about that socioeconomic breakdown?

Yeah. So I think that in middle upper class society, that figure’s really shocking. And the idea is, oh, cannabis user is, oh, someone like you, someone who has a good job, went to college, and maybe uses occasionally. No. I say if you want to think of the typical user, think of somebody who works in a gas station who gets high on all their breaks. That’s much more the sociodemographic breakdown of it.

And by the way, that’s what you see with tobacco as well. In my professional middle class life, it is so rare for me to see somebody smoking a cigarette. But if you go into a poor neighborhood, there’s still a lot of people who smoke cigarettes.

And so we’ve won the war on smoking I guess, middle class and well off. But it’s far less the case as you move into people who have much more challenging lives. And this comes back to the point that you raised and I think is really important one is that since that professional class makes the policies, it’s really important for them to remember that their lives are different than the people whose lives will be most profoundly affected by those policies.

One thing that a lot of drugs, cannabis being one of them, do is allow you to escape from a life that doesn’t feel good to you. If I had a job that bored the hell out of me, it might be more appealing to use something like cannabis more often. I really like my job. And I definitely cannot do it high, so I don’t. But there’s both a question of how does this affect you as a person but also how much might you want it, need it, need the escape?

I think this gets down to one of the most important questions to ask, which is, why don’t more people use drugs? People say, why does anybody use drugs? And it’s like, well, do you ask me why anybody has sex? That’s a really strange question. It feels good. We don’t need an explanation why people use them.

It’s actually far more interesting to think, why aren’t we all using them? Why aren’t you and I using drugs right now? And big reasons why are, well, we have other rewards in our lives. And we have a lot of other stuff that we want to do that is rewarding.

So in the absence of those things, the why not question, the answer seems to be, well, I can’t think of a reason why not. I might as well. Well, you won’t live as long. Well, I don’t expect to live that long. You won’t do well in your brilliant career. I don’t have a brilliant career. You won’t enjoy your fabulous house. I don’t have a fabulous house.

And that’s a reason I think it’s easy or it should be easy to have some sympathy. We all don’t have the same set of rewards to choose from. Rewards any neuroscientists would tell you are judged relative to each other. We don’t just make judgments over good, bad, but we do a lot of this is better than that. So as you pull rewards out of an environment, yeah, drugs become relatively more appealing.

It feels to me across this conversation that we’re talking about two eras that didn’t really work. I think a lot of people are worried about just a pendulum swinging between extremes. I’m curious if to you there is a synthesis out there either in a place or in a theory that feels like it balances these different realities, that people will use drugs? They are good for some people and terrible for others, that we don’t want to be throwing adults constantly into jail because they did something with their own bodies. We don’t want tons of people to get addicted because we decided not to throw anybody in jail. Is there something that feels to you like it strikes a balance here?

So years ago, when I worked for President Obama, we cited Washington’s example because they had taken a couple of hundred million dollars, spent it on mental health and substance use treatment, and showed within 12 months they’d actually made all their money back because of less crime, because of less disability, because of less trips to the emergency room. And importantly, they had gathered data to show that. And that was one of the things we used when the Affordable Care Act was being done to explain why covering substance use in that package would be a good deal for the taxpayer in addition to, of course, being a good deal to any person who had that problem.

There’s also certain issues where people with very different views and feelings about drugs can agree. So I’ve been working with a lot of people around the country on building Medicaid into the correctional system starting in California. It was pushed by a fabulous assembly member named Marie Waldron. We turn Medicaid on before people leave. And that gets them typically on some type of medication. And that can pull people together because it makes it far less likely for them to die of an overdose or to have other health problems. And it also makes them much less likely to commit crimes. And so you can get people like, well, I’m not very sympathetic. I don’t want to spend money on the health of some drug user. But if it makes them less likely to commit more crime, I like that. And other people say, well, this is a health matter. It’s like, well, then they like it too.

And that approach, which now multiple states have been approved for and the Biden administration C.M.S. has said, you can all have this Medicaid waiver — I don’t know the current number. I think it’s about 14 or 15 other states are applying. And as an example of something where you don’t necessarily have to resolve all the disagreements, but you can find a policy that maximizes multiple outcomes that a broad section of people care about.

Something I’ve seen you talk about and write about is this idea that the way that policing should work here is it should be very, very predictable, very certain you will get picked up, and very modest. It’s sort of almost like it operates as a constant annoyance. You end up in jail for 24 hours and are let loose. And there was some evidence that definitely did decrease repeat offending not among everybody but among enough people to really matter in the study. Do you still think that’s a good idea?

Absolutely. It’s a good principle for enforcement and for deterrence to have it be predictable, responsive, and fair. There’s been a lot of success with drink driving and alcohol through the program 24/7 Sobriety, which started in South Dakota and has now spread to about 15, 20 states and is also now in other countries.

It’s all across England, all across Wales where I was just last week actually working on that, which is a model whereby people are sentenced after their second, third, fourth, fifth alcohol related arrest to not be allowed to drink. They aren’t sent to jail. They aren’t fine. Their cars aren’t taken away. But their alcohol use is monitored literally every single day with swift and certain but modest consequences if they drink.

And that program has reduced incarceration. It has reduced crime. It has reduced domestic violence. And it strikes a good balance between using the criminal justice system to protect and put some constraints on people but not in a way that ends up being carceral.

And the place where we can really make a huge impact on that in the United States is the million people we’re already supervising on probation and parole who have substance use problems. And we need to roll those out more broadly. For example, Oregon’s new policy mix if implemented properly, which will be a challenge, I think it would be a very good one. They do put pressure on people to seek treatment. But they say literally, no one is going to be put into a prison in Oregon simply because they used a drug. And now they’re building up the other part you got to have, which is have to have the health system and the services that keep people alive while they use and then help them get into recovery. That, I think, is a very appealing mix of things.

We have a really hard time, I think, in the U.S. and lots of policy issues of realizing that it’s not a series of on/off switches. It’s a series of dials. And you can adjust things and find sensible, nuanced approaches that are more effective than what fits on a bumper sticker.

And I feel like that’s what my job is. And people like me who do not have to take the great risk to stand up and people and say, please vote for me. And then that means I have to explain something simply. It can’t be any other way but are next to it and are very fortunate to have the time to sift through evidence in a calm environment before they venture out with some suggestions about what we might do better.

I think that’s a good place to end. So then as a final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

So there’s so many good books written about in this area. It’s hard to pick. So I decided to prioritize personal relationship starting with your late friend of mine Mark Kleiman, who wrote a book called “Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know,” coauthored with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken.

And it is exactly what the title promises. It’s accessible. It’s something you can dip into and out of and answer any question you want. And I also point to it as just a model of how academics in any area can write in such a fashion that a broad audience can engage their work and learn from it.

The second book I would suggest, again, from a friend who’s someone I’ve known since she was a psychiatric resident and I was an assistant professor. And that’s Dr. Anna Lembke here at Stanford. And the book is called “Dopamine Nation,” which was a deserved bestseller around the world.

But that gives you much more of the human experience describing, what is it like to be addicted, to not be able to stop doing something even though you know it’s destructive? How does it feel? How do you try to overcome it? And what is going on in that person neurologically that makes it so hard? And then the book also talks about just the seeking of reward in a reward saturated society and how we all are chasing all these things, whether it’s on our cell phones or with drugs and so on.

And then the last one — maybe a more eccentric choice, but it’s such a good book — is by Thomas De Quincey. And it’s called “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” So De Quincey was a hangers on of the romantic poet set about 200 years ago in England. And he wrote at the time a very scandalous account. But, of course, also scandalous things in Britain are often very popular things.

So it became a bestseller about his experience of long time opium use. And he talks about the pains of opium and the pleasures of opium and a bit about how it affects social relationships, how it affects human psychology. And what I like about is, first off, it has a wonderfully florid over the top poetic style. And the other thing is almost everything you and I have talked about today is touched on in that book. And that shows that while we do learn things and we go forward with science, with policy, it is also true that the human relationship with drugs has had the same benefits and challenges in it for time immemorial. And so that’s a reminder of that when you read a book written that long ago and can resonate with so much of what’s going on today.

Keith Humphreys, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 1^: Overnight, Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize most street drugs.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 2^: Even drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth, and oxycodone.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 3^: It’s a sea change. Measure 110, which was passed by 58 percent of Oregon voters, treats active drug users as potential patients rather than criminals.

EZRA KLEIN: I’ve been involved in drug policy reform for a long time. I got into it in high school. And this was not a politics that seemed possible back then. In that era, the idea that you would have a state decriminalize heroin possession, I mean, it was unthinkable. But in the coming decades, there would be a real turn on the war on drugs — the overpolicing, the mass incarceration, the racism, the broken families. It was not achieving, as far as anybody could tell, anybody’s policy goals.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Thanks, Ezra. Good to talk to you.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s a tendency to just use this term “drugs.” And that tendency just belies a huge amount of variation, I think, in how people think about different drugs, how they think about opioids, how they think about stimulants, how they think about psychedelics, how they think about cannabis, alcohol, caffeine. Is this a useful term?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So “drug” is an incredibly vague term that covers an enormous number of drugs that have very different properties. The biggest one, I think, is the capacity to instill addiction. People don’t get addicted to LSD, for example. But they do get addicted to heroin. That’s really important.

They do get addicted to nicotine. That’s really important. So you would think about those drugs differently, the ones that have the ability to generate an illness with obsessive compulsion to use in the face of destructive consequences over and over and over again. Those belong in their own class, I think.

EZRA KLEIN: So this major drug policy reform went into effect in Oregon in 2021, Measure 110. It passes. What happens next?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Part of what happens is exactly what the reformers hoped would happen, which is that there’s a dramatic drop in arrests — arrests for drug possession and arrests for drug dealing. So they say, wow, that’s a victory. On the other hand, some of the other aspects of it didn’t work out the way people planned.

Well, it turned out that over 95 percent of the people got those tickets simply threw them away, which, keeping with the spirit of the law, there was no consequence for doing that. Hardly anybody called. The new body they set up to distribute the new funds had very serious management problems because the people — they may have been terrific human beings, but they weren’t actually experienced in how do you run a government bureaucracy.

EZRA KLEIN: So not everybody agrees that Measure 110 was a failure, certainly not as a policy. I mean, it definitely failed politically. The Drug Policy Alliance says that it failed because of disinformation because there was a concerted effort to undermine it. And they cite data from the Oregon Health Authority saying that, look, health needs screenings increased by almost 300 percent. Substance use disorder treatment increased by 143 percent. Is there some argument to this that we’re looking at the wrong measures and, judged according to its goals, 110 was actually kind of working?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: If what you care about the most was a drop in drug arrests and involvement of people who use drugs and deal drugs in the criminal justice system, then it was a success clearly because there was very little contact anymore between law enforcement and people who sell and deal drugs. But on the health side, no, I don’t think that. And those statistics on treatment I believe count a lot of one time consultations. I think what most people, particularly people who love someone who has an addiction, are looking for is evidence on people getting better, people getting into recovery, not just at some point having some transitory contact with the system.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s another argument that’s made in the Drug Policy Alliance document and other things I’ve seen and that has occurred to me, too, because when I think about Oregon, when I think about San Francisco, when I think about Washington State, I mean, you’re talking about places with very broken housing markets. We’ll talk I’m sure more about the Tenderloin.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: There’s an intense argument out here in the Bay Area between people who say, look, the homeless crisis is just a side effect of addiction. And people say, look, the addiction crisis is just a side effect of homelessness. And I would say they’re both wrong in that, even within my personal group of acquaintances, I know people who lost their home because of an addiction. And it’s not that the housing market discharged them, they had an empty property. But they were out on the streets. And then there are people who lost their housing and then were living next to drug markets on the streets and developed an addiction there.

EZRA KLEIN: So to go back to Oregon and one of the theories that was operating there was that we’re going to move more money into treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer in the sense that you will not be arrested for seeking treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer for you to seek treatment. We’re going to make it cheap to seek treatment. Why didn’t more people seek treatment?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: That theory reflects a misunderstanding about the nature of addiction, which is that it is like, say, chronic pain or depression, conditions that feel lousy for the person who has them all day long, and they will do anything to get rid of them. Drug addiction is not like that. It has many painful experiences. It destroys people’s lives.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask about this from the other direction, which is maybe this all just wasn’t nearly liberal enough because one of the arguments made — and I do think there’s evidence behind it — is people are getting stuff they don’t know. And the reason people die from fentanyl laced heroin or simply fentanyl that they thought was heroin is because they don’t have a source they can trust. Part of the difficulty here is, yes, people end up addicted. We don’t have really good treatments for addiction that we can come back to whether you think that is a true claim.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah, well, certainly using fentanyl in an illicit market is extraordinarily dangerous. And my colleagues and I are trying to figure out the death rate per year of a regular user. It might be as high as 5 percent. So that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do.

EZRA KLEIN: So Measure 110 passes in 2020. It goes into effect in 2021. What happens to it in 2023?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: At that point, overdoses were way up. And popular sentiment has shifted pretty dramatically. I think quite a few people felt burned. They hadn’t gotten what they’d been promised. And that included people who, for example, had relatives who were addicted who they assume would be getting into treatment and recovery and then weren’t able to get services.

EZRA KLEIN: If you’ve been around drug policy conversations for a long time, you’ll have heard a lot, I have heard a lot, about Portugal. And Portugal is a place where they decriminalized drugs. And it has been a much more sustainable, solid policy. So what is different about Portugal?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Portugal is different in policy and different in culture. So they definitely don’t throw people in prison, and it’s decriminalized. But they do have what are called dissuasion commissions that do assessments of people, say, who arrested in the street for using drugs. And you have to show up to this assessment. And they can push and nudge people to seek care.

You never hear this in San Francisco or Portland. Everybody is from somewhere else. And many people actually moved to the West to get away from everybody else, to get away from social constraints. I want to be my own person. Well, Portugal is the opposite of that.

EZRA KLEIN: This is something that I always think people underestimate at least about San Francisco, which is one of these cities under the best, which is that it is a culture of enormous tolerance. And that is a lot of what makes San Francisco remarkable, what has made it a home for L.G.B.T.Q. people when that was a very rare thing to be, what has made it open to all these weird ideas from computer scientists and strange nerds who came around with their thoughts about AI and their thoughts about visual operating systems.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: That is a very nice description of the city we both love. And we’d be much poorer without San Francisco’s embrace of individual freedom and all the great things that it gives, which you just articulated. To me, the resolution here is taking addiction seriously as a problem.

So when I talked to somebody who said, look, you need to just let people do what they want, I say, look. I volunteer in the Tenderloin. And I carry naloxone, the overdose rescue medication, with me. If someone were in front of me in overdose and dying, should I administer naloxone even though the person can’t consent, they’re unconscious?

EZRA KLEIN: Is that a straw man, though? I can’t really think of people at least that I have heard arguing that somebody under the throes of heroin addiction is free and is choosing the life they live, that they’re likely to be happy with the world they now exist in.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: One of the really striking things about this new rhetoric about drug policy out here is how rarely addiction is even mentioned. The fact that there’s so much focus on drug overdose, which is, of course, terrible, but that is treated as the only index and not addiction reflects a viewpoint that that’s not either an important thing or not that real a thing. Because if it were, you would note that in the heyday of wild opioid prescribing, there were fewer overdoses, but there were far more people who were addicted to those substances. And that made their lives dramatically worse.

EZRA KLEIN: So this is complicated, I think, because there’s this interaction in this period between what you might call elite and mass drug culture. In this period, you have the rise of a lot of super popular podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss, who are very open about their psychedelic use. You have Michael Pollan’s great book on psychedelics, “How to Change Your Mind.” I do a bunch of podcasts about psychedelics. You have a book by Carl Hart, who’s a well-known drug researcher at Columbia, called “Drug Use for Grownups” where he talks openly about using heroin to relax at the end of the day. Ketamine use rises in a very public way.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah. I’ve seen that very much, too. And people with a platform, they’ve got a hearing. One of the most important things to understand about Measure 110, for example, is it passed easily. It was not that controversial as people thought it would be. And that elite change, I think, was part of the dynamic.

EZRA KLEIN: That all makes sense to me. But something else I would say was here was that I would have described the consensus for a very long time as drug use is bad, and policing is good. And to some degree, by the time of 110 and some other reforms we were seeing in other states, I think that there was — and you can tell me if this tracks for you — a belief that drug use is somewhere between neutral and good depending on the drug, and policing is bad.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah. There’s no way to separate what happened in Oregon from the murder of George Floyd and from Black Lives Matter. I mean, the protests against police were as intense in Oregon as anywhere they were in the United States and indeed throughout the region and a lot of concern — and it’s got to be said — a lot of justifiable concern about racism and policing. And a huge portion of that was focused on drug enforcement. And that flip was clearly part of why the bill passed.

In terms of drug use, I think there’s a split. I mean, so there are people who accept it’s a health matter. So let’s move to that part of the population, some of whom will say, it’s not a good idea, but we should add health services, and I certainly wouldn’t punish anybody for it, to people would say, no, it is good. In fact, it is actively good. Drug use is good. Drug use should be accepted and maybe even promoted or celebrated. And the debate has been, I think, between those two strands, whereas in the ’80s, it was more between “drugs are bad — period” and “they should be legal even if they’re good or bad.”

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve written about billboards that I used to see and always thought were somewhat strange around fentanyl use and showing happy people — and these were in San Francisco — showing happy people and suggesting if you’re going to use this stuff, use it with friends. Use it around others. Make sure you’re not doing it alone.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So several things there you’re saying, I think they’re important. One is, absolutely. In the face of all this death and all this suffering, we’re all desperate for solutions. And I think it is good that we are thinking in very fundamental ways about what the solutions are. That should be the case when you have this much suffering.

EZRA KLEIN: I lived in San Francisco during this period. It also had a highly liberalizing attitude on drugs. It had significant open air drug markets, particularly in the Tenderloin.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yes, they are. And I volunteer in the Tenderloin. So I’ve spent a lot of time in those neighborhoods and definitely pick up that sense. And, say, for a number of people would express it in an even harsher way, which is the government is tolerating it where I live in a way they would never tolerate it in a wealthier neighborhood. That could be coupled also with a sense of some of those people in the wealthier neighborhoods say this should be tolerated, but they’re not having to tolerate it. I am. And that generates understandable anger.

EZRA KLEIN: I was reading recently a lawsuit filed by residents of the Tenderloin against San Francisco. And it was saying in a way that is illegal and unconstitutional, it was alleging that San Francisco — and everybody knows this to be true — was not enforcing laws in the Tenderloin the way it was in other parts of the city, that it had settled on a containment strategy in the Tenderloin.

And the Tenderloin is really rough for people who have not walked around there. I mean, the disorder, the despair, the difficulty’s incredibly visible. And one of the things that was noted in the lawsuit was that the Tenderloin has a much higher ratio of children than most parts of San Francisco. It has a lot of immigrant families, a lot of poor families. And so this is being tolerated where really a lot of kids were.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Why are there hundreds of dealers standing on street corners in the Tenderloin and in the south of Market? They are not there to service the neighborhood. Because if you live in a neighborhood and your dealer lives in the neighborhood, your dealer doesn’t have to stand on a corner. You know each other. You can text. You can just stop by and make your transactions.

EZRA KLEIN: One question I’ve had about all this is how much of it is a set of policies that might’ve worked or certainly worked better than they did, but fentanyl rolled a grenade underneath this? I mean, a lot of this thinking was happening years before fentanyl just completely invaded America.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: The emergence and dominance of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl among the opioids or super strong methamphetamine that is now a larger share of the market than cocaine has, I think, undermined basic assumptions about drug policy across the world. When a kind of person who might come into, say, a methadone clinic addicted to heroin, their heroin use might be once a day or maybe twice a day, including people who were holding jobs, people who still were in touch with their families. Not that life was going well, but there was some level of manageability. We now have people with fentanyl using 10, 20, 30 times a day. Their entire existence is — because fentanyl has a very short cycle of action.

EZRA KLEIN: How good now is our best gold standard addiction treatment?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So this varies a lot by drug. I’m going to start with the bad news first, which is the stimulants. So the biggest disappointment of my career is about cocaine and methamphetamine. I started my career in the late 1980s. And the care that people got for those drugs then is almost the same as what they get now. There’s been very little progress.

EZRA KLEIN: But how good are any of these? I mean, let’s zoom in on alcohol for a minute. I’ve known a lot of people — people I’ve loved — who have had very severe alcohol addictions. And you can’t be near that and not realize how differently different drugs act on different people. If I am drinking, just at some point, my body is like, that’s good. We’re done.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: People who seek for alcohol treatment or Alcoholics Anonymous can fall into three bins. If you look at them about 6 or 12 months later, somewhere between 40 percent, 50 percent are dramatically better off. Their lives are dramatically better. And that could be the completely abstinent, or they’re much more abstinent, but their lives are dramatically better.

EZRA KLEIN: How much is the risk of developing an addiction genetic?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Genes affect us a lot. Studies across addictions show a genetic contribution. It varies by the substance, but at least 30 percent, sometimes even 50 percent. How much control people have just in general — some people are more impulsive than others, have a harder time thinking about the future than others from their first day on this Earth. And that will increase your risk for addiction.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s not just that I find it easy to be sympathetic. But I find it hard to know how to think about it because, to be blunt, I’ve had very positive personal experiences with certain drugs. And at the same time, I’m somebody who is extremely nonaddictive in this area of my life. I have never wanted more puffs on a cigarette than I had. I’ve never smoked a cigarette and been like, I need another one. Obviously, other people I knew when I was in college, that was not how that went for them.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: I agree, yeah, because drugs aren’t good, and drugs aren’t bad. They are good and bad. And sometimes I envy colleagues who work in areas like cholera prevention. If there’s a cholera outbreak, and you get rid of it, you’re a hero. Everybody loves you.

Nobody says, but I was having a party. I need a little cholera. Can’t you keep a little cholera for special occasions? It’s like, no, everyone just hates cholera. Drugs are absolutely not like that. People have great experiences with drugs. I drink wine, by the way. That’s a drug. Or ethanol is a drug.

EZRA KLEIN: I wonder about this with the rollout of legal cannabis across a lot of the country. So this is something that I occasionally take. I’ll sometimes have a 5 milligram edible to help me sleep or to relax at the end of the night. It isn’t something I want all that often. And when I go into these stores, and I look in them, and I see the way they’re popping up in New York the way they popped up in California, it’s pretty clear this market is not catering to me.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So start at the question of should we ever throw people in a cell for cannabis? Oh, so that was a terrible idea. So let’s take that off the table and just say if we’re going to have a legal industry, have we regulated it well? And I think it’s absolutely clear we have not.

EZRA KLEIN: Wow, really? Almost half?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah. I’d say about 40 percent are daily or near daily users. And so that’s where the money is if you’re running an industry. And so you want to produce cheap high-strength product that that population will use and use and use and use. And I just think we’re really going to regret that.

EZRA KLEIN: My friends over at “Search Engine,” which is a great podcast, just did this two part series on the New York cannabis market. And I had not really understood that while New York is now completely full of what appeared to me to be legal cannabis stores, virtually none of them are legal cannabis stores. There’s a very small number of legal ones and then a huge number of illegal ones.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah, the experience you’re having — I think people have had across a lot of drug policy — is expecting one thing and then getting another and underestimating the ideological commitments of the people who designed it. So there are people who say, we’re going to have this legal market, and we’ll get rid of the illegal sellers and all that. But that isn’t what necessarily they wanted. They just thought, look, this should not be restricted at all. And you should just be able to deal with it and sell it and have a classic Libertarian understanding of it as opposed to a more progressive understanding of what we expect from industries. And this problem is replicated all over the country.

EZRA KLEIN: You said this about cannabis, and I found it really striking. Quote, “The newly legal industry looks a lot like the tobacco industry — an under-regulated, under-taxed, politically connected, white dominated corporate entity that generates its profits mainly by addicting lower income people to a drug. 85 percent of Colorado’s cannabis, for example, is consumed by people who did not graduate from college.” Can you say a bit more about that socioeconomic breakdown?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Yeah. So I think that in middle upper class society, that figure’s really shocking. And the idea is, oh, cannabis user is, oh, someone like you, someone who has a good job, went to college, and maybe uses occasionally. No. I say if you want to think of the typical user, think of somebody who works in a gas station who gets high on all their breaks. That’s much more the sociodemographic breakdown of it.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that a lot of drugs, cannabis being one of them, do is allow you to escape from a life that doesn’t feel good to you. If I had a job that bored the hell out of me, it might be more appealing to use something like cannabis more often. I really like my job. And I definitely cannot do it high, so I don’t. But there’s both a question of how does this affect you as a person but also how much might you want it, need it, need the escape?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: I think this gets down to one of the most important questions to ask, which is, why don’t more people use drugs? People say, why does anybody use drugs? And it’s like, well, do you ask me why anybody has sex? That’s a really strange question. It feels good. We don’t need an explanation why people use them.

EZRA KLEIN: It feels to me across this conversation that we’re talking about two eras that didn’t really work. I think a lot of people are worried about just a pendulum swinging between extremes. I’m curious if to you there is a synthesis out there either in a place or in a theory that feels like it balances these different realities, that people will use drugs? They are good for some people and terrible for others, that we don’t want to be throwing adults constantly into jail because they did something with their own bodies. We don’t want tons of people to get addicted because we decided not to throw anybody in jail. Is there something that feels to you like it strikes a balance here?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So years ago, when I worked for President Obama, we cited Washington’s example because they had taken a couple of hundred million dollars, spent it on mental health and substance use treatment, and showed within 12 months they’d actually made all their money back because of less crime, because of less disability, because of less trips to the emergency room. And importantly, they had gathered data to show that. And that was one of the things we used when the Affordable Care Act was being done to explain why covering substance use in that package would be a good deal for the taxpayer in addition to, of course, being a good deal to any person who had that problem.

And so you can get people like, well, I’m not very sympathetic. I don’t want to spend money on the health of some drug user. But if it makes them less likely to commit more crime, I like that. And other people say, well, this is a health matter. It’s like, well, then they like it too.

EZRA KLEIN: Something I’ve seen you talk about and write about is this idea that the way that policing should work here is it should be very, very predictable, very certain you will get picked up, and very modest. It’s sort of almost like it operates as a constant annoyance. You end up in jail for 24 hours and are let loose. And there was some evidence that definitely did decrease repeat offending not among everybody but among enough people to really matter in the study. Do you still think that’s a good idea?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Absolutely. It’s a good principle for enforcement and for deterrence to have it be predictable, responsive, and fair. There’s been a lot of success with drink driving and alcohol through the program 24/7 Sobriety, which started in South Dakota and has now spread to about 15, 20 states and is also now in other countries.

They do put pressure on people to seek treatment. But they say literally, no one is going to be put into a prison in Oregon simply because they used a drug. And now they’re building up the other part you got to have, which is have to have the health system and the services that keep people alive while they use and then help them get into recovery. That, I think, is a very appealing mix of things.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a good place to end. So then as a final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

KEITH HUMPHREYS: So there’s so many good books written about in this area. It’s hard to pick. So I decided to prioritize personal relationship starting with your late friend of mine Mark Kleiman, who wrote a book called “Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know,” coauthored with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken.

EZRA KLEIN: Keith Humphreys, thank you very much.

KEITH HUMPHREYS: Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Examples & Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Smoking
Persuasive Essay Examples About Smoking. Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death in the world. It leads to adverse health effects, including lung cancer, heart disease, and damage to the respiratory tract. However, the number of people who smoke cigarettes has been on the rise globally. A lot has been written on topics related ...
Argumentative Essay on Smoking Cigarettes
The dangers of smoking cigarettes have been well-documented, yet millions of people continue to engage in this harmful habit. The debate over the impact of smoking on public health is ongoing, with some arguing for stricter regulations and others advocating for personal freedom. In this essay, we will explore the various arguments surrounding smoking cigarettes and ultimately make the case for ...
235 Smoking Essay Topics & Titles for Smoking Essay + Examples
In your essay about smoking, you might want to focus on its causes and effects or discuss why smoking is a dangerous habit. Other options are to talk about smoking prevention or to concentrate on the reasons why it is so difficult to stop smoking. Here we've gathered a range of catchy titles for research papers about smoking together with ...
10+ Top Persuasive essay about smoking examples
Aim For the Emotions. Use powerful language and vivid imagery to draw readers in and make them feel like you do about smoking. 8. Use Personal Stories. Share personal stories or anecdotes of people who have successfully quit smoking and those negatively impacted by it. 9. Include an Action Plan.
Why People Should Stop Smoking
Smoking is a dangerous and addictive habit that has been proven to cause numerous health problems. This argumentative essay about smoking explains why people should stop smoking. It also provides a free essay example for those who want to quit smoking.
On Why One Should Stop Smoking
Habitual smokers are at a very high risk of cancer. It has been known that smoking is one of the leading causes of cancer. Taking the case of United Kingdom alone, approximately 106, 000 individuals die annually due to smoke related cancer. Some of the diseases caused and or worsened by smoking include, lung cancer, diseases of the heart ...
Essays About Smoking
Argumentative Essay: This essay type aims to persuade the reader about the negative effects of smoking. It presents an argument and provides supporting evidence to convince the reader that smoking is harmful and should be avoided. Persuasive Essay: Similar to an argumentative essay, this type of essay aims to persuade the reader to quit smoking.
Tobacco Smoking and Its Dangers
Introduction. Tobacco use, including smoking, has become a universally recognized issue that endangers the health of the population of our entire planet through both active and second-hand smoking. Pro-tobacco arguments are next to non-existent, while its harm is well-documented and proven through past and contemporary studies (Jha et al., 2013).
Persuasive Essay About Smoking
A persuasive essay is written to convince your reader of a particular opinion, point of view, or stance. These essays typically use persuasive devices such as logical arguments and emotional appeals to make their point. The goal of persuasive essays about smoking is to convince your reader that smoking is dangerous and should be avoided.
Writing a Smoking Essay. Complete Actionable Guide
Whether you are writing a teenage smoking essay or a study of health-related issues, you need to stay objective and avoid including any judgment into your assignment. Even if you are firmly against smoking, do not let emotions direct your writing. You should also keep your language tolerant and free of offensive remarks or generalizations.
Persuasive Essays About Smoking
Here are some examples about smoking that can provide inspiration for your writing: Persuasive speech on smoking outline. Persuasive essay about smoking should be banned. Persuasive essay about smoking pdf. Persuasive essay about smoking cannot relieve stress. Persuasive essay about smoking in public places. Speech about smoking is dangerous.
Smoking Persuasive Speech: [Essay Example], 545 words
The detrimental effects of smoking on health are well-documented, yet the habit persists in many societies. This persuasive speech aims to address the issue of smoking and advocate for its cessation. The thesis of this speech is that smoking is a harmful and addictive habit that not only negatively impacts the individual's health but also has ...
Argumentative Essay about Smoking
Another argument is that smoking is addictive and most smokers want to quit well that is natural selection because they continually ignore the signs so the gene of not paying attention to the signs and having an addictive mindset will go out. The final argument that they use incorrectly is that most smokers start in adolescence.
Essay on Smoking in English for Students
Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas. Conclusion of the Essay on Smoking. Thus, if anyone is a slave to cigarettes, it is essential for them to understand that it is never too late to stop smoking. With the help and a good action plan, anyone can quit it for good. Moreover, the benefits will be evident within a few days of ...
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Persuasive Essay On How To Quit Smoking 1009 Words | 5 Pages. Smoking involves physical addiction and psychological habit. You'll experience physical withdrawal symptoms and cravings once you're in the process of eliminating the habit of smoking regularly, particularly on a daily basis. You may have also used smoking as a way of dealing ...
Should Cigarettes Be Banned? Essay
Cigarettes contain many harmful chemicals; it was found that cigarettes have more than 4,000 chemicals. Most of these components are known to cause cancer. Smoking is known to cause lung cancer, bladder cancer, stomach Cancer, kidney cancer, cancer of oral cavity and cancer of the cervix. Ammonia, Tar and Carbon Monoxide are found in cigarettes ...
How to Write the Essay on "Ways to Quit Smoking"?
Once you decide to work out a booming quit smoking program, make sure to include the following elements in your essay: Pharmacological products appropriate use. Those, who are severely addicted to the cigarettes, could consider using nicotine-replacement elements so that the body could gradually get rid of nicotine-addiction.
Should Smoking Be Made Illegal: Argumentative
In the "should smoking be illegal argumentative" debate, one of the primary concerns is the well-known harmful effects of cigarettes on the human body. Many people are aware that smoking cigarettes is detrimental. Cigarettes contain numerous chemical substances such as cadmium, butane, acetic acid, methane, ammonia, arsenic, methanol, nicotine ...
1 Introduction, Summary, and Conclusions
Tobacco use is a global epidemic among young people. As with adults, it poses a serious health threat to youth and young adults in the United States and has significant implications for this nation's public and economic health in the future (Perry et al. 1994; Kessler 1995). The impact of cigarette smoking and other tobacco use on chronic disease, which accounts for 75% of American spending ...
Persuasive Essay on Smoking
Everybody is alert to the dangers of smoking however nobody cares to stop it, and this attitude toward smoking ought to be modified. Smoking is the vilest dependency of concerning 2 billion that rectangular measure smitten with aid of smoking. ... Persuasive Essay on Smoking. (2023, March 01). Edubirdie. Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https ...
Persuasive Essay On Stop Smoking
Persuasive Essay On Stop Smoking. Smoking is a huge problem in today's society. Many people don't understand the consequences that come with smoking. Cigarettes and marijuana are very common uses of smoking. As a college student I am able to the effects these two drugs have on students mental and physical abilities.
Argumentative Essay On Smoking Cigarettes
Cigarettes cause more than 480,000 deaths per year (Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking). Cigarettes ruin slowly but surely the lives of numerous smokers and even nonsmokers. Cigarettes should be illegal because of the products in cigarettes, the damages they cause to the human body, the negative effects they have on pregnancy, how addictive ...
Importance of Quitting Smoking
Quitting smoking is therefore an important way of regaining self confidence by doing away with the embarrassing smell of cigarette smoke. Quitting smoking is an important way of shedding off the worry of the constant coughs and short breath brought about by smoking (Quit Smoking Review para 2-3). Quitting smoking comes with a myriad of benefits ...
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Keith Humphreys
In my professional middle class life, it is so rare for me to see somebody smoking a cigarette. But if you go into a poor neighborhood, there's still a lot of people who smoke cigarettes.

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