More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.

That’s the claim, anyway, made in a 1930s advertisement featuring a white-coat-clad, spectacle-wearing medical professional with a cigarette poised between his fingers.

In another ad, a chubby-cheeked baby implores her mother to smoke a Marlboro instead of scolding her.

And in case neither a doctor’s endorsement nor a child’s plea are enough encouragement to smoke, an ad featuring a young Ronald Reagan packs a double-whammy — promising that any “studly guy” who smokes “lots and LOTS” of Pall Mall cigarettes will both “turn on the ladies” and “rise to political success.”

As ludicrous as these decades-old messages seem today, statistics for 2007 show that cigarette marketing still is effective in Buchanan County — especially among the 18- to 24-year-old age group.

“They are going after young people, that’s for sure,” says Steve Wenger, process leader for Heartland Regional Medical Center. “They know once they have them hooked, they’ll use cigarettes a long time.”

The 2007 Buchanan County data, which is now available at www.stjoehealthinfo.org, reports that 37 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds smoke — a 2 percent increase from 2005.

Most other age groups saw a similar increase, resulting in a total smoker rate of 26 percent, which compares to a national rate of 20 percent.

The data also show the rate is highest among the least-educated and poorest residents of the county, which matches what is true about smoking and socioeconomic status on a national level. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was published in the July/August issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion reports that some poor families actually choose to purchase cigarettes rather than food — something many might find hard to believe but that made sense to the researchers.

“Smoking is an addiction that gets established in adolescence, before individuals fully understand the long-term implications of their behavior,” Dr. Brian Armour, who led the researchers, says in an article published by Health Behavior News Service. “Poor families suffer the long-term health impact.”

But despite the fact that Buchanan County, like the demographic studied by the CDC, has a significant percentage of poor individuals who smoke, there is good news, Mr. Wenger says: The overall smoker rate is still down from when it was at its highest — 31 percent — in 2001. Programs aimed at assisting smokers in kicking the habit likely have played a part in this decrease, but Betty Richey, the leader of Heartland’s cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation units, knows there’s still plenty left to do.

“I think overall, smokers know what the major consequences of nicotine use are,” says Ms. Richey, who leads freedom-from-smoking classes at Heartland. “They just may not be able to accept that these consequences will happen to them.”

Among the most significant consequences of smoking are, of course, heart disease, lung cancer and stroke. But even for people willing to play the odds with these — as well as for young smokers who may assume they’re decades away from having to worry about being sick — smoking has immediate effects on the body.

And not all of these are bad. Nicotine hits the brain within seven seconds of entering the body, Ms. Richey says, and causes the smoker to feel calmer and more alert. But it also causes blood vessels to constrict, making the heart work harder and blood pressure increase. At the same time, the blood is carrying a lot less oxygen than usual.

“Think about people who already have trouble breathing due to something like asthma,” she says, “and imagine using nicotine on top of that. It’s really not good.”

In addition, wounds that occur where blood vessels have become diseased due to nicotine have a more limited ability to heal. Experiencing symptoms like this may not always be enough to make smokers give up the habit, Ms. Richey says, but she has seen people commit to quit after having family members die of a smoking-related disease.

Maybe it’s experiences like this that have inspired a new generation of smoking (or, rather, anti-smoking) ads — ads like one with a woman named Trudi who was diagnosed with lung cancer at 38, one with a man named Ronaldo who was diagnosed with throat cancer at 39.

There’s even a series of ads featuring a New York man who began smoking as a child and still smokes half a pack a day, despite losing part of one leg and having two heart attacks before age 30 due to smoking.

“Cigarette smoking is killing Skip Legault,” one ad says. “Don’t let it kill you.”

Say goodbye to smokes

The freedom-from-smoking classes offered by Heartland Regional Medical Center take place in eight-week sessions and help smokers make a plan for dealing with quitting. The next session will begin in the fall.

Heartland also offers one-on-one counseling for smokers. For more information about this or the classes, call 271-7835.

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.