Raising tobacco awareness in the LGBTQ community

OAKS, Pennsylvania (WPVI) -- Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of tobacco use of any major city, with even higher rates in the LGBTQ+ community.

There's now a concerted effort to get that community screened for the damages smoking can do.

The deceptive tactics used by Big Tobacco to get Black Americans hooked on cigarettes are widely known.

But fewer know that LGBTQ Americans have also been exploited.

"Targeted advertisements to LGBT, LGBTQ-specific magazines, events, philanthropy," says Dr. Jamie Garfield, a Temple Health Lung Ctr. pulmonologist.

"Big Tobacco managed to really portray the community in a way that felt like we were seen and heard," she adds.

So Dr. Garfield says smoking is now firmly entrenched.

Tobacco use is far higher in the LGBTQ community than in heterosexual or cisgender people.

"It's even more pronounced when you look at youth data," she notes.

Yet tobacco isn't seen as a major problem.

"It is so incorporated into sort of the, the life of a lot of LGBTQ people that they don't see it the way they saw AIDS," she says.

In addition, Dr. Garfield says we don't really know how much lung cancer, emphysema, cardiovascular, and other tobacco-related disease is in the LGBTQ+ community, because, until recently, no one asked about sexual orientation or gender identity.

She says even those wanting to quit often need extra help, starting by understanding how they got hooked.

On the federal level, the CDC's effort includes first-person accounts from former smokers.

"As a gay teen, trying to figure out who I was, I hid behind cigarettes. And when I figured out who I was, I was so addicted to nicotine it was hard for me to quit," says Angie P. in her video.

Temple's Healthy Chest Initiative has tailored literature inviting current or recently quit smokers between the ages of 50 and 80 to be screened, and anyone who has smoked at least a pack a day for at least 20 years.

Dr. Garfield says the low-dose CT scan takes less than 5 minutes and can detect a variety of conditions from heart disease to osteoporosis in addition to lung cancer.

It was a lifesaver for a patient with a tumor, but no symptoms.

"She said, if I didn't get this screening test, I never would have found this," the doctor recalls.