Welcome to this special tobacco-awareness issue of In Touch. The main reason for this issue is to provide you with up-to-date knowledge, tools and information to help our communities deal with tobacco misuse. Recently, the Canadian government announced a new initiative the Federal Tobacco Control Strategy. Within the goals of the new initiative is included a program for First Nations and Inuit communities. We will give you a breakdown of what this initiative means as well as assist you in knowing what funding and resources are available for your community to combat tobacco misuse.
We will take a look at the current tobacco epidemic; First Nations’ spiritual and ceremonial use of tobacco; environmental tobacco smoke; tobacco’s effects on pregnant women; as well as youth and tobacco.
Some fundamental topics that will be discussed in greater detail are community readiness and best practices in cessation. We will also keep you abreast of the recent developments in tobacco misuse advertising campaigns for Aboriginal People.
A couple of successful regions will be profiled and interviews with project leaders will help provide the outline of models to set up in other communities. And finally, you will find a list of available resources. Together, we can help reduce the number of people who die each year because of tobacco misuse.

62 per cent of First Nations 15 years of age and older use tobacco habitually.

72 per cent of Inuit use tobacco habitually.

Action is being taken to help our communities decrease the number of people who smoke. It is our hope that this issue of In Touch will help provide some information on what we can all do to help our friends, neighbours and loved ones maintain and improve their health with regards to the very serious dangers of tobacco misuse.

THE NEW FEDERAL AND ABORIGINAL
INITIATIVES

By now, many of us are aware that tobacco misuse is unhealthy, yet many among us continue to smoke tobacco products and use spit tobacco. Can we imagine a day when the tobacco industry will no longer be able to cause the pain and harm that it does today? A land without the poisons of cigarettes, chewing tobacco, snuff, cigars and pipes? A genuinely smoke-free environment? Although a complete nationwide end to our current smoking epidemic is not exactly around the corner, little by little, steps must be made in order to reduce the amount of tobacco misuse.
Recent measures have been announced that are a breath of fresh air to all of us working on keeping our loved ones and ourselves healthy and free from the dangers of tobacco.
These recent announcements can be broken down into two main categories: Health Canada’s Tobacco Control Strategy and the First Nations and Inuit Tobacco Control Strategy.
The goal of these two strategies is to reduce the prevalence of tobacco misuse and thus lower its associated, disproportionately high, risk levels.  In doing so, this will elevate the health status of the First Nations and Inuit populations, thereby lengthening the lives of thousands. The approach will take time, much the same way it takes time for an individual to quit smoking. Rather than seeing it as an event (it is rare to just go cold turkey and quit on the spot), we should see it as a process, whereby smokers gradually work at quitting until the time comes when they can happily say that they have quit once and for all.