World No Tobacco Day Feature "Put This In Your Pipe and Smoke It!"

by Earl Bousquet

May 31, 2002 - It’s that time of the year once again, when the Cancer Society reminds us that smoking is bad for our health and when the health people around the world dole out the statistics that tell us just how much damage smoking is doing and at what cost.

It’s been some years now that the tobacco industry around the world has been exposed as a purveyor of bad health. After long years of court battles featuring lies, bribes and much deceit, the tobacco industry in the united States has been fpouind guilty of peddling death. Way back in 1993, cigarette smoking was found to be responsible for 90% of all lung cancer cases among men and 79% among women. In other words, 87% of all deaths from lung cancer were caused by cigarette smoking and 30% of all cancer deaths came from smoking cigarettes. It was also found that those who smoke two or more packets of cigarettes per day are 12 to 25 times more liable to get lung cancer than those who don’t smoke.

In the last five years, a rise in public pressure on the US Congress forced legislators to begin taking position on cigarette smoking. While those in states producing g cigarettes backed the tobacco companies, others were forced to admit the healthy evidence of the dangers of smoking. This led to an increase in the number of persons across America suing the tobacco industry for costing them their health – and eventually their lives. The US courts also accepted that the evidence was overwhelming and several suits were settled with rulings against Big Tobacco. Millions were paid in major cases and the number of suits multiplied. In the end, the US courts made a ruling that basically protected the tobacco companies by making it very difficult to prove that tobacco caused you to get cancer that you didn’t choose to get cancer yourself by smoking. The legal arguments apart, however, the tobacco companies were forced to admit that nicotine was addictive and that they put it in the tobacco to make it addictive, to ensure that people were hooked on it. (It was the same thing with Coca Cola, which, up to the sixties, used coca – the leaf that produces cocaine – to hook people to the taste of what people simply saw as a popular soft drink.) Not to be beaten, the tobacco companies are continuing to produce and are pitching their sales overseas to markets like the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Now, with people demanding more and more smoke-free places and more and more people complaining about the effects of second hand smoking, the tobacco companies are now trying to develop what they call a smo0keless cigarette

But it’s not only in America that things are changing for Big Tobacco. In the Caribbean too, people are becoming more and more conscious of the fact that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health. With less people smoking, local tobacco companies are going out of business and imported cigarettes are becoming more costly. And to discourage people from putting their health in danger, more and more governments across the Caribbean are increasing the taxes on tobacco imports. In St. Lucia’s case, the government went further and announced in its last budget that the extra taxes collected from the latest increase in the tax on cigarettes will go to the local Cancer Society to help in its good work. The Ministry of Health has also announced that by next year, it is intended that there will be new legislation regarding tobacco and tobacco products. And ministry personnel have intensified their work among youth, who have been found to be increasingly prone to start smoking, while at the same time drawing attention to the connection between smoking and AIDS. The health personnel pointed out last week, for example, that people who have tested HIV positive and who smoke are more prone to contracting full blown AIDS than those who don’t smoke.

The St. Lucia cancer Society has persevered in its efforts throughout the year to encourage those of us who smoke to kick the habit. It’s members continue to urge smokers to stop smoking and those who don’t smoke not to start but to continue to live a healthy lifestyle. It urges those who smoke to ask themselves why they do and those who want to stop to ask themselves why they continue.

To help it get the message across to us, the Cancer Society often relies on global facts and statistics to drive the message home to those of us who still feel we should puff our lives away. The latest statistics regarding the cost and casualties of smoking cigarettes ought to blow you away.

Last month, the World Health Organisation indicated that 4.2 million people – 30 times the population of St. Lucia – die every year from use of tobacco. To put it another way: every eight seconds of every day, one person dies somewhere in the world from using tobacco.

Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it!

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