Ciggyfree Blog & Gov Alert

Should the University of Tennessee accept money from the tobacco industry to help promote the growth of domestic tobacco production? That ethical question has yet to be debated—even nearly six months after UT quietly received a one-year $445,000 grant from Philip Morris to establish and operate a Center for Tobacco Grower Research in Morgan Hall on the Knoxville campus.News of the grant is coming as a surprise to anti-smoking activists and even UT staff.

“It blows me away that UT would take money from a cigarette manufacturer, knowing that smoking kills,” says Douglas Benton, an Alcoa resident who earned a business degree at UT and founded No Smoking in Restaurants in Tennessee (NoSIR) in 2005. “I don’t like people making one penny off killing other people. I don’t understand why my university would try to help farmers to make more money selling something that has no possible benefit at all to a human.”
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A new study indicates that smoking is linked to anxiety with depression, as well as to anxiety alone. However, people who are depressed but not anxious smoke the same as any other smokers. These findings come from a joint study from Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH), University of Bergen and King’s College in London.

The link between smoking and anxiety/depression was most apparent among women and young people. Data were collected from 60 000 participants in “Health Studies in North-Troendelag” (HUNT), a study based in a county in northern Norway.

Figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show that 30 percent of inhabitants in the western world smoke daily. Earlier studies have found that people with mental health problems are twice as likely to smoke as the rest of the population. Injuries to physical health after smoking are well documented. It is also known that smoking is linked to other psychological problems. Anxiety and depression are the most common complaints and are often both present in people who smoke.
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