Health Blogger Says Obama Should Keep Smoking

It's bad enough he's going to have to give up the Thunderbird in the hood, I guess we don't need him having nicotine fits too.

With Barack Obama readying himself to take on what will be quite a high-stakes and stressful job, are we sure we actually want him to quit smoking? “The nation is too precariously balanced right now to risk having him burst into tears, or march off in a snit, or take to his bed with the glums,” suggested an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend.

We put in a call to Neal Benowitz of the University of California, San Francisco, an expert in nicotine addiction. He told us that there is evidence that stopping smoking can cause irritability, slowed reaction time, or difficulty concentrating and solving problems. But that’s typically in heavy smokers — people who’ve smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day. “You don’t want a regular smoker to pilot a plane when they can’t smoke, because their performance is impaired,” Benowitz told the Health Blog.