Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When smokers inhale smoke into their lungs, they take the drug nicotine into their bodies and brains, where it affects how the smokers feel and act. When smokers display their cigarettes, they are saying something symbolic and personal about themselves. And when smokers smoke, they put themselves at risk, often knowingly, of early disability or death.

Smoking is one of the world′s most pressing public health problems. Cigarettes, Nicotine, and Health reviews the severe problems caused by smoking and examines individual and public health approaches to reducing smoking and its attendant health problems. Cigarettes are the most popular, most addictive, and most deadly form of tobacco use, with cigarette design contributing directly to the dangers of smoking; most of the book focuses on this predominant form of nicotine use.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Why Bio-Behavioural? Why Cigarettes, Nicotine, and Health?
• The History of the Use of Nicotine
• A Tasty Wonder Drug for Many, if Not All, Occasions
• Who Smokes and What Kills Them
• What Nicotine Does to the Body
• The Natural History of a Dependence Disorder
• Tobacco Use as Nicotine Addiction
• Smoking, Drinking and Drug-Taking
• A Bio-behavioural Syndrome
• 'Low-Tar', 'Light' Cigarettes
• Lessons from a Dangerous Boondoggle
• Helping Smokers Quit
• Smoking, Public Health and Policy

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This work by Kozlowski (Pennsylvania State Univ.), Henningfield (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and Brigham (SRI International, Menlo Park, California) is best described as a critical, multidisciplinary look into the multitude of factors associated with the use of tobacco products, primarily in the form of cigarettes. Topics include a history of tobacco use, why people smoke, addictive properties of nicotine, pharmacological effects of nicotine, nicotine as an addictive drug compared to that of heroin/cocaine and caffeine, unethical practices of the tobacco industry, current and past attempts to diminish cigarette usage, and what needs to be done in this regard in the future. A thorough but concise discussion of these and related topics is presented in ten chapters totaling only 158 pages. One topic, however, receives only superficial notice: the contradictory behavior of governmental bodies that subsidize tobacco products on the one hand for economic reasons but mount huge programs to limit their use for public health reasons. Although scientifically unbiased, the authors treat the tobacco industry as totally evil. Literature references are preponderantly Kozlowski's. All levels. R. S. Kowalczyk formerly, Ferris State University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Janet Brigham, Ph.D. is a senior researcher in SRI International's Center for Health Sciences. In this role, she focuses on developing effective ways to study tobacco use and to design technology-based treatment options. She and a team are testing and deploying an evidence-based, data-driven smoking cessation mobile app that applies a personalization algorithm in a dynamic, interactive format. The team hopes to extend this approach to additional behaviorally based health interventions. An experimental psychologist with a focus on clinical neuropsychology, she received postdoctoral training in tobacco research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, the National Institute on Drug Abuse Addiction Research Center, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. She earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Brigham Young University. She started studying psychology after earning bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism and communications and a 15-year career as a journalist, author, and editor. Brigham was a full-time consultant to the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, and has been a research psychologist at SRI since 1997, working primarily in addiction research. Author and co-author of two books about nicotine and tobacco, she was an editor of Nicotine & Tobacco Research from 2001 to 2009 (managing editor, 2006 to 2009). Her interest in publishing and dissemination also has involved editing three nonprofit newsletters, one of which recently was judged best of its class in the United States.