"I still buy cigarettes from here,” said smoker Larissa Solomonskaya, a customer at the Brighton Beach Deli & Grocery on Brighton 11th Street. “I'm sure so do others. It's a frightening picture, but I don't know if it's enough to make people quit smoking."
"Everybody here knows what smoking does to you,” said a cashier at the deli, “so the posters didn't really change much. Business is still the same with cigarettes, it didn't change."
"It hasn't really affected business, but if we don't put it up, we get a $2,000 fine. It has to stay forever,” said Amit Gulati, an employee of Yireh Deli Grocery on Brighton Beach Avenue.
On a recent afternoon at convenience stores and chain-pharmacy outlets along Avenue U and on Nostrand Avenue, customers were buying cigarettes apparently without even noticing the posters. At some outlets, the poster was right next to the cash register, while at others, it was displayed next to the cigarettes, not prominently visible from the main counter.
But city health officials are confident the posters will have an effect. They say studies show that smokers who fully realize the hazards of smoking are more likely to consider quitting. The idea of the posters is to “ensure that any customer contemplating a tobacco purchase sees the health effects of tobacco use,” the department states. “Last year New York City achieved its lowest adult smoking rate on record (15.8%), but about 950,000 New Yorkers still smoke – and tobacco-related illness still claims more than 7,400 lives in the city each year. Smoking kills more New Yorkers than AIDS, drugs, homicide and suicide combined.”
Kateryna Stupnevich contributed to this story
Third strike for cigarettes
It’s well-documented by now what smoking does to the user, and what second-hand smoke does to those near the smoker – but a new study shows that third-hand smoke is dangerous, too.
The study -- by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federal Department of Energy lab at the University of California at Berkeley -- published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that nicotine vapor from lit cigarettes collects on walls, carpets, drapes, furniture, and other indoor surfaces and can linger for months.
"Our study shows that when this residual nicotine reacts with ambient nitrous acid it forms carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines,” said Hugo Destaillats, one of the authors of the study. TSNAs are “among the most broadly acting and potent carcinogens in unburned tobacco and tobacco smoke," he said.
Opening a window or turning on a fan to air out a room while a cigarette burns does not eliminate the third-hand smoke, which is particularly dangerous for infants and toddlers, the researchers said.
Smoking outdoors doesn't help much either. "Smoking outside is better than smoking indoors, but nicotine residues will stick to a smoker's skin and clothing," said Lara Gundel, another author of the study. "Those residues follow a smoker back inside and get spread everywhere.”
-- David J. Glenn
