I Only Smoke When I Drink

While the past 40 years have seen significant declines in adult smoking, this is not the case among young adults, who have the highest prevalence of smoking of all other age groups. At a time when just about everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, why do so many college students smoke? Is it a short lived phase or do they continue throughout the college years? And what happens after college, when they enter the “real world”? Drawing on interviews and focus groups with hundreds of young adults, Lighting Up takes the reader into their everyday lives to explore social smoking. Mimi Nichter argues that we must understand more about the meaning of social and low level smoking to youth, the social contexts that cause them to take up (or not take up) the habit, and the way that smoking plays a large role in students’ social lives. Nichter examines how smoking facilitates social interaction, helps young people express and explore their identity, and serves as a means for communicating emotional states. Most college students who smoked socially were confident that “this was no big deal.” After all, they were “not really smokers” and they would only be smoking for a short time. But, as graduation neared, they expressed ambivalence or reluctance to quit. As many grads today step into an uncertain future, where the prospect of finding a good job in a timely manner is unlikely, their 20s may be a time of great stress and instability. For those who have come to depend on the comfort of cigarettes during college, this array of life stressors may make cutting back or quitting more difficult, despite one’s intentions and understandings of the harms of tobacco. And emerging products on the market, like e-cigarettes, offer an opportunity to move from smoking to vaping. Lighting Up considers how smoking fits into the lives of young adults and how uncertain times may lead to uncertain smoking trajectories that reach into adulthood.

Screw Eat, Pray Love! Esme Oliver vows to Smoke, Drink, and Fuck her way to happiness. Newly-dumped, staring headlong into the barrel of 40, and veering towards a nervous breakdown, Esme heads to Italy for two weeks of carnal excess aimed at distracting from a life that is crumbling all around her. It is there that she meets the much younger Fernando, an Italian stallion who appears to be just the diversion Esme’s looking for. Only problem is they fall in love. Or so Esme thinks. Based on a true story, Smoke, Drink, Fuck, winner, Best Memoir, of the Southwest Writer’s Competition is the hilarious, outlandish and inspiring story of one fed-up woman’s journey from desperation to liberation. As she finds and loses love, uncovers what it really means to be independent, and discovers why no amount of praying does the trick of one great fuck.

Alcohol use by young people is extremely dangerous - both to themselves and society at large. Underage alcohol use is associated with traffic fatalities, violence, unsafe sex, suicide, educational failure, and other problem behaviors that diminish the prospects of future success, as well as health risks â€" and the earlier teens start drinking, the greater the danger. Despite these serious concerns, the media continues to make drinking look attractive to youth, and it remains possible and even easy for teenagers to get access to alcohol. Why is this dangerous behavior so pervasive? What can be done to prevent it? What will work and who is responsible for making sure it happens? Reducing Underage Drinking addresses these questions and proposes a new way to combat underage alcohol use. It explores the ways in which may different individuals and groups contribute to the problem and how they can be enlisted to prevent it. Reducing Underage Drinking will serve as both a game plan and a call to arms for anyone with an investment in youth health and safety.

"I have the ability to act interested in something a guy is saying when I'm really thinking about how cute my new boots are." Meet the girl who could be you - if your perfectly planned life fell apart on Valentine's Day. Comfortably situated in her twenties, she is happy and sure of her future; until the day a waitress at some Mexican restaurant changes this smoker's life from absolute certainty to absolute insanity. In this Ab Fab meets Bridget Jones adventure, follow our heroine through three years of good dates, bad moods and friends who always want to go dancing on Thursdays. This say-anything book is full of two-week relationships, way too many cigarettes, and the birth of her split personality, Glamourina. Take a voyeuristic look into the mind of a girl who plans her life through daydreams and lip-gloss, while discovering the meaning of life at the bottom of a vodka tonic. This could be the story of your life, if yours were as funny, tragic and fabulous as hers. "Don't read this book on the bus. People will think you're a laughing lunatic!"-Richard Reid, Northwest Cable News

This report considers the biological and behavioral mechanisms that may underlie the pathogenicity of tobacco smoke. Many Surgeon General's reports have considered research findings on mechanisms in assessing the biological plausibility of associations observed in epidemiologic studies. Mechanisms of disease are important because they may provide plausibility, which is one of the guideline criteria for assessing evidence on causation. This report specifically reviews the evidence on the potential mechanisms by which smoking causes diseases and considers whether a mechanism is likely to be operative in the production of human disease by tobacco smoke. This evidence is relevant to understanding how smoking causes disease, to identifying those who may be particularly susceptible, and to assessing the potential risks of tobacco products.

In the critically acclaimed Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Manhattan journalist Susan Shapiro revisited five self-destructive romances. In her hilarious, illuminating new memoir, Lighting Up, she rejects five self-destructive substances. This difficult quest for clean living starts with Shapiro’s shocking revelation that, at forty, her lengthiest, most emotionally satisfying relationship has been with cigarettes. A two-pack-a-day smoker since the age of thirteen, Susan Shapiro quickly discovers that it’s impossible to be a writer, a nonsmoker, sane, and slender in the same year. The last time she tried to quit, she gained twenty-three pounds, couldn’t concentrate on work, and wanted to kill herself and her husband, Aaron, a TV comedy writer who hates her penchant for puffing away. Yet just as she’s about to choose her vice over her marriage vows, she stumbles upon a secret weapon. Dr. Winters, “the James Bond of psychotherapy,” is a brilliant but unorthodox addiction specialist, a former chain-smoker himself. Working his weird magic on her psyche, he unravels the roots of her twenty-seven-year compulsion, the same dangerous dependency that has haunted her doctor father, her grandfather, and a pair of eccentric aunts from opposite sides of the family, along with Freud and nearly one in four Americans. Dr. Winters teaches her how to embrace suffering, then proclaims that her months of panic, depression, insecurity, vulnerability, and wild mood swings win her the award for “the worst nicotine withdrawal in the history of the world.” Shapiro finally does kick the habit–while losing weight and finding career and connubial bliss–only to discover that the second she’s let go of her long-term crutch, she’s already replaced it with another fixation. After banishing cigarettes, alcohol, dope, gum, and bread from her day-to-day existence, she conquers all her demons and survives deprivation overload. But relying religiously on Dr. Winters, she soon realizes that the only obsession she has left to quit is him. . . . Never has the battle to stem substance abuse been captured with such wit, sophisticated insight, and candor. Lighting Up is so compulsively readable, it’s addictive.

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport examines religion in America today, reviews just how powerfully intertwined religion is with every aspect of American society, and explores what appears to be religion’s vibrant future in the U.S. — all based on more than a million interviews conducted by Gallup since 2008. Popular books such as The God Delusion have dismissed religion as a delusional artifact of evolution and ancient superstitions. But should millions of Americans’ statements of belief and their behavior be dismissed that quickly? The pattern of religious influence in American society suggests mass consequence rather than mass delusion. In God Is Alive and Well, Frank Newport, Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief, provides a new evidence-based analysis of Americans’ religious beliefs and practices — and bold predictions about religion’s future in the U.S. Most Americans are at least marginally religious, significantly more so than in most developed nations around the world. The majority of Americans believe in God and say that religion is important in their daily lives. And Americans routinely participate in religious rituals. Levels of religious consciousness are not distributed equally. Systematic patterns of differences in religion occur with surprising regularity. An American’s religiosity is very much bound up with social position and geographic space. There is an important interplay between religion and life status factors — age, gender, marital status, having children — and with achieved status distinctions — class, education, income. Those who are most religious are demonstrably different across a wide spectrum of outcomes from those who are not. These include lifestyle choices, social participation, ideology, partisanship, and views on political and social issues. Religion can be the driver for highly disruptive social behaviors, up to and including the taking of human life. Unlike citizens of any other country in the world, Americans group themselves into hundreds of distinct micro religious groups and denominations. These groups are constantly evolving, splitting like amoeba to form new groups. The most common pattern today is the development of the “no name” religious group, consisting of Americans who worship only under the banner of their own nondenominational predilections. These religious groupings are sociologically related to social status, geography, politics, and social and political attitudes. The emotional, non-negotiable bases of religion and the nature of its appeal to the most ultimate of rationales mean that highly religious Americans are one of the most potentially influential groups in society. Religious beliefs provide a foundation for much of today’s American politics. America is and will remain a religious nation, and it is entirely possible that in many ways, religion will be more, rather than less, important in the years ahead. The foundation for God Is Alive and Well is the perspective of science — analyzing what people think, do, and believe about religion. Frank Newport’s distinction as a well-known social scientist and authority on American life, his media experience, and his unique personal history as the son of a Southern Baptist theologian will increase this book’s sales potential. God Is Alive and Well is based in large part on more than a million interviews Gallup has conducted in recent years — interviews that asked Americans about their religion, their religious beliefs, and their religious behavior. The resulting data provide an unparalleled and unprecedented database of information about Americans and their religions. Written for lay readers using a conversational tone, God Is Alive and Well presents new information with an entertaining style.