Youth Are Prime Target of Killer Cigarettes. Reflections No 499, 19 August 2010
Submitted by FatherSean on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 19:02.
Youth Are Prime Target of Killer Cigarettes
Fr Shay Cullen's columns are published in The Manila Times,
in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.
Fr Shay Cullen's columns are published in The Manila Times,
in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.
It’s when the frightening, desperate gasping for breath fills the house and the fifty-five year Pedro Galmanan, father of five, struggles to suck oxygen into his lungs to stay alive, that his children realize the terrible effects cigarette smoking has on their father.
His addiction to cigarettes cost him his job, drove the family into poverty and his withdrawal symptoms were an agony to witness. They now watch their father slowly die, wheezing as the emphysema consumes his life.
Tobacco is a killer, a poison of mind and body, addictive and destructive of families. Besides causing cancer, especially lung cancer, and other diseases such as cardiovascular, pulmonary, metabolic diseases, the smoke causes heath problems to bystanders too.
Cigarette vendor, Butuan City, Philippines
In the Philippines, it is estimated that cigarette smoking kills as many as 250 people a day, 90,000 a year. The greatest evil is that tobacco companies are targeting the youth and succeeding in addicting them in their thousands every year.
The tobacco industry must recruit new young smokers and addict them for life to continue its profit-making business since it is aggressively killing off its customer base with its poison product. The dead have to be replaced with the living. In Indonesia alone cigarette smoking kills as many as 400,000 people a year and costs the nation billions of dollars in health costs.
The Philippine tobacco industry, whose interests are represented by the Philippine Tobacco Institute (PTI), are a powerful and influential lobbying body. Members and supporters include the Philippines’ biggest tobacco firm, Lucio Tan’s Philip Morris-Fortune Tobacco Corporation, and other corporations like the Anglo-American Tobacco Corporation, La Suerte Cigar and Cigarette Manufacturing Inc., and Mighty Tobacco Corporation.
As the name suggests they have mighty influence in the Philippine congress and allegedly donate to politicians. Influential lobbyists allegedly manipulated the congress to water down the stronger provisions of the proposed anti-smoking law (RA 9211 passed in 2003), with words that they can now use to their advantage to prevent stronger health warnings on cigarette packs such as graphic pictures.
The newly appointed Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Enrique T. Ona has vowed to implement the departments order (AO 2010-13) issued by the previous health secretary Esperanza Cabral to have the tobacco companies print graphic images on their cigarette packs as health warnings as they do on there export packs as required by Singapore and Thai law.
The DOH order was immediately and aggressively opposed by the tobacco lobby led by the president of the Philippine Tobacco Institute, Rodolfo Salanga. He warned Secretary Cabral that such images would be illegal under RA 9211. But he has been shown to be incorrect since the present law only forbids additional text, not pictures, to be added to the pack.
The graphic images have the most powerful deterrent effect on youth. It is one of the recommendations of the World Health Organization’s framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which demands the 168 signatories, like the Philippines, to 'implement large, rotating health warnings on all tobacco packaging and labeling'. Already 38 countries have implemented the picture-based warnings and the 27 member European Union has recommended each member to implement it.
Fortune Tobacco Company headed by the tycoon Lucio Tan won a preliminary injunction against the health department to stop the implementation of the order that was issued 24 May 2010 to place the picture-warnings on the packs. Judge Reyes of Marikina ruled on 1 July in favor of the company.
The power and influence for the tobacco industry worldwide is well known and actively opposes every restriction that will save people from smoking-related ill-health. These tactics are so well known that the WHO convention against smoking had this to say to nations who are party to the convention: 'In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law.' (WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Article 5.3).
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There is a battle out there in the world, in every country where cigarettes are sold and millions of victims are facing the possibility of a very painful and agonizing death from smoking related diseases. We have to do all we can to stop the promotion and sale of killer cigarettes.
Email: preda@info.com.ph
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Contact Fr Shay Cullen at the Preda Center, Upper Kalaklan, 2200 Olongapo City, Philippines.
Email: preda@info.com.ph
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PREDA Information Office
PREDA Foundation, Inc.
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www.preda.org
- 3630 reads
Smoking
On my mother's side of the family my grandfather, who smoked, died from lung cancer at 59 and my mother and three of her sisters, all of whom smoked, died prematurely from illnesses in which their smoking was a factor.
I hate to see young people, especially seminarians and priests, smoking. On the other hand, I am turned off by harsh anti-smoking laws in such places as Davao City which has more than 800 unsolved murders, most of them of poor people, many of them minors.
I think that the malls in the Philippines have helped bring about a change of culture with regard to no smoking signs. Before these were totaly ignored but nobody smokes in malls. So there is hope that smoking may eventually become something that future generations will shake their heads about.
My father started smoking
My father started smoking when he was 12. He's been a chain smoker since then. This month he turned 60 and in an attempt to bring an end to his lifetime addiction, he started advocating health through walking.
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Negros-Walk/141069502570371?ref=ts
He is currently walking the whole circumference of the Negros Island. He started on his birthday, Aug 4 and from then on he said goodbye to smoking. My mother, who's tagging along in our car said withdrawal symptoms is not easy...he hopes to finish the walk this coming weekend and hopefully by then he's surpassed the hardest part of the nicotine withdrawal.
Your father's pilgrimage
I wish your father well on his pilgrimage around the island of Negros and on his novel approach to giving up smoking. I've had friends who were chain-smokers like him and who gave up 'cold turkey', as Americans say, ie, just stopping.
Here in Ireland laws forbidding smoking in most public buildings and stadiums have been effective and people are very slow to light up when visiting someone else's home. There's a story about our prime minsiter, Brian cowen, smoking while coming out of Croke Park, Ireland's biggest stadium, last Sunday. when challenged he put out his cigarette. It seems he thought he was in a smoking-allowed area.
My hope is that through a combination of laws - without becoming draconian - and a change in attitude among people that smoking will evenutally disappear.
However, you sometimes read about silly things such as a cartoon of Bugs Bunny, made in the 1940s, in which he was smoking, being banned from TV in the UK, I think. If you look at movies from the 1940s and set in that era, eg, Casablanca, you'll see everyone smoking. In one scene in Casablanca Captain Reynaud, the police chief, lights up as he's about to leave Rick's. When he walks out the door two seconds later he throws away a butt! The contiuity man fouled up there!
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