Smoking Can Wreck Your Sex Life
Right after a CBS News 60 Minutes report on the link between smoking and impotence, reporters were out conducting smoker-on-the-
street interviews, asking some very personal questions. And in California, a new campaign shows a cigarette drooping limply and asks if smoking is "still sexy."
For years, scientists have warned that smoking can contribute to impotence as well as fertility problems in men.
Anti-smoking forces have seized on the finding in a bid to get people to kick the habit.
| "The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view is that it is easy to imagine it shriveled up and shrunken whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious." Clive Bates, director of Action on Smoking and Health |
In California, a $21 million campaign launched in June includes a commercial showing a cigarette drooping limply. The message: "Cigarettes. Still Think They're Sexy?"
In Thailand, the health ministry ordered the nation's tobacco monopoly to print a new warning on cigarette packs: "Cigarette smoking causes sexual impotence." However, it appears only on a fraction of the packages.
In England, public health activists are lobbying for a similar warning label.
The impotence risk and strategy are attracting media attention. Last Sunday, CBS News' 60 Minutes devoted a segment to the subject.
By the next day, reporters in many cities were conducting smokers-on-the-street interviews with a blunt question: Are you willing to give up your sex life for cigarettes?
Some smokers might dismiss the impotence risk as a desperate move by anti-tobacco crusaders who will blame smoking for anything and everything.
But health experts and tobacco foes explain that the biological link between smoking and impotence is too clear and logical to be ignored.
"It all has to do with blood circulation," said Elizabeth Whelan, director of the New York-based American Council on Science and Health. "Americans still don't understand the specific risks of smoking."
Whelan and other activists are hoping the message will get through to those who aren't deterred by familiar warnings about slow-developing threats such as cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. Altogether, smoking kills 400,000 people in the United States annually.
"What a terrible problem for the man because he is so physically addicted," Whelan said. "It will be interesting to see if this motivates men, especially young men, to disassociate themselves from that image of impotence."
Statistician Steven Milloy, who regularly contradicts what he regards as "junk science" and frequently sides with the tobacco industry, sid anti-smoking forces are distorting a 1994 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that concluded that smokers are twice as likely as nonsmokers to be impotent.
Milloy adjusted the CDC data to consider blood vessel disease, hormone imbalances, and other risk factors. As a result, he said, the link between smoking and impotence became statistically insignificant.
The impotence-and-smoking message has been boosted in part by the runaway popularity of Viagra. Pfizer Inc. reported that three of four men who participated in its clinical trials for Viagra were smokers. And, Pfizer found, 21 percent of men with erectile dysfunction have underlying conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes, all of which can be caused or complicated by smoking.
Urologists say smoking can diminish erections by reducing blood flow in the penis, just as it can clog blood vessels to the heart. In studies published since 1989, between 39 percent and 82 percent of men suffering from vascular impotence were smokers.
Smoking can reduce fertility in men, too. Chemical compounds in cigarette smoke can change levels of hormones and enzymes that affect the number, shape, and mobility of sperm, all important in conception.
Clive Bates, director of the London-based Action on Smoking and Health, said the warnings about smoking and impotence are shockingly effective because lighting up a cigarette is so often associated with the after-sex experience.
"The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view is that it is easy to imagine it shriveled up and shrunken," he said, "whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious."