He said that the anti-smoking clinic would be officially opened in October, but that it was operating experimentally now. The clinic will be open to everyone. Its services will be free and hospital patients, especially the elderly with diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease, will be referred to it if physicians believe smoking is harming their health. Smoking is an addiction in every sense, he said, and not merely, as people used to say, just a bad habit.
Smoking is no less an addiction than drugs.
Smoking it could never lead to breaking the tobacco habit. Smokers will get physical and psychological treatment at the clinic to ensure that even a heavy smoker will quit within three months. The clinic needs financial support and Amin called on federal and local departments and public welfare organisations to support it. He urged smoking parents to become the clinic's first patients because it had been proved that the children of smoking parents inevitably acquire the habit also. For information about the content or for permission to redistribute, publish or use for broadcast, contact our syndication department.