Tobacco use is a socially motivated behavior. Much of the social science
research on tobacco use and prevention highlights the social and ecological
forces surrounding tobacco use1,2 and
the importance of changes in the social climate for reducing the cultural
acceptability of tobacco use.3 In Learning to Smoke, Jason Hughes presents an analysis of
these social and cultural factors to determine why people smoke. According
to Hughes, most attempts to understand tobacco use have had either a clinical
psychological or a medical orientation, whereas this text integrates these
approaches with an analysis of the social and cultural influences on tobacco
use.