Resumo:
This research calls on Practical Theology, Pastoral Counseling and Spirituality to give
attention to Smoking Cessation since tobacco has become the greatest isolated cause of
precocious avoidable deaths, a pandemic with an estimated five (5) million deaths a year in
the world and two hundred (200) thousand in Brazil. It defines possible elements of
approximation in the care of smokers within community environments. The first chapter deals
with the historical aspects of the evolution of smoking; the industrialization of cigarettes and
derivatives; the discoveries of the harmful effects of the use of tobacco, alerting to the issue of
integral public health and the concrete experience which gave origin to this paper. The second
chapter presents smoking as dependence highlighting that the tobacco, of all the known drugs,
is the one which provokes the greatest bio-psycho-chemical dependence. The chapter presents
some elements of the traditional treatment of smokers; it registers some of the more relevant
public campaigns and most important world, national and state movements in the struggle for
smoking cessation. The third chapter suggests that Practical Theology through Counseling
and Pastoral Care should occupy itself with the themes which involve the prevention of the
initiation of new smokers, the treatment, the control through laws which promote public and
private smoke free environments and the protection of non-smokers, proposing strategies
which can contribute to the cessation of smoking based on Judeo-Christian ethical
reservations. The fourth chapter highlights practical aspects where spirituality can act as a
protection factor in the cessation of smoking, and in a special way through counseling
support, help people who wish to stop smoking. Considering that many have tried everything
they knew of to stop smoking , but a large part has not tried through cultivating spirituality,
and that in Brazil of the 27 million smokers (20% of the population), 22 million wish to stop
smoking (80% of the smokers), and that life exists after the cigarette , the importance of
spirituality is highlighted as a synthesizing link and the core of the wholeness of life which
is capable of broadly supporting and sustaining the decisions of the people who wish to stop
smoking.
