Tobacco is the largest health threat to gay and bisexual men today. Why is quitting so hard?
In the early days of 2005, flush with $350,000 of Health Canada and provincial funding, community activist Steven RodRozen was hired to do something about the number of gay men who smoke.
A new study at the time showed that while only 19 percent of British Columbians smoked cigarettes, the number jumped to 29 percent among LGBT people.
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Smoking and HIV
Also concerning is that men living with HIV were even more likely to smoke, and even less likely to successfully quit. According to Dr David Moore, a research scientist and lead author on the study, this is one of the most worrying trends for people living with HIV today.
While Moore says it’s not clear how much more dangerous tobacco is to people living with HIV, serious illnesses caused by smoking such as heart and lung disease and cancer can make management of HIV more difficult, and health outcomes worse.
“It’s a bit disconcerting,” Moore says, “because as HIV treatment is getting better and people are living longer, cigarette smoking is becoming one of the most important reasons why HIV positive people don’t live as long.”
Those living with HIV in the United States today are more likely to die of smoking than from the virus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 30,000 LGBT Americans now die from tobacco-related causes every year, contrasted with only about 7,000 Americans whose deaths are directly attributed to HIV. While comparable data on how many LGBT Canadians die of tobacco-related causes doesn’t exist, our rates of LGBT smoking are just as high, and deaths from HIV are even lower.