No Place for Blame
As for the guilt, please remember that the people who start smoking are generally 12 or 13 years old. I will leave it to you to decide whether that is a time when people make informed adult decisions. Clearly, that is not the case. These children are faced with billions of dollars of advertisements and promotion of cigarette smoking. Is it an informed choice that an adult would make? I would say no. I would say that the 12-year-olds that make the decision to start smoking are not in a position to make an informed choice. I would also say that by the time you are in a position to make a better choice, you are addicted to cigarette smoking, and it is an addiction that is very, very hard to lick. Should we blame smokers? Absolutely not. They were targeted. They were up against forces that were far beyond their years, and most people who go on to develop lung cancer today have stopped smoking. So, blaming the smoker and saying that quitting smoking will solve lung cancer is not correct. We have to think of lung cancer the way we think of any other type of disease. The etiology is, of course, cigarette related, but the vast majority of people have stopped smoking, and we must take lung cancer seriously as a disease and deal with it.
Of course, tobacco cessation efforts are extremely important. There is so much to be gained by stopping smoking, not just for lung cancer but for a host of other diseases. But it is very important that people who have stopped smoking but develop lung cancer do not blame themselves, and that healthcare providers in particular and society in general do not blame them either. In many ways, they were victims. They have heeded the health warnings and stopped. Please remember that we as healthcare professionals need to do whatever we can to keep the next generation from smoking, but at the same time, we need to focus on efforts to cure the lung cancers that have developed in people who smoked in the past. They have made the good effort and stopped smoking, and we need to try to help them. There is no place for guilt here. We just have to fight this awful disease.