Anti-Smoking Day: ‘Care if I die?’

Parliamentary health secy says Punjab to introduce law banning smoking in public.

LAHORE:

Eleven-year-old Ahmed coughs incessantly as his mother carries him out of Gulab Devi Chest Hospital. He looks pale and weak and each time he coughs, his face contorts in pain.

“At first we thought he had come down with tuberculosis. He couldn’t sleep all night and neither could we,” says Ahmed’s mother. “Later we found out that it’s a reaction to his father’s smoking.”

Ahmed has lung bronchitis, says his doctor, pulmonologist Dr Tahir Saeed. He hopes that with daily medication and nebulising and distance from his smoking father, Ahmed will recover. But there’s also a real chance he will end up an asthmatic.

Dr Saeed says he has seen many cases of innocents paying the price for others’ bad habits during his 30 years in the field. Each year, he organises a walk on Anti-Smoking Day to raise awareness of the hazards of smoking.

Last year, he and a few colleagues teamed up with an NGO to launch an anti-smoking campaign at various schools. Students signed huge banners with pledges such as ‘I won’t let my father smoke’, ‘I will throw away any cigarettes I see in my house’ and ‘I will not talk to family members until they quit smoking’.

Dr Saeed says it is important to target children in such walks and campaigns. Older smokers, he says, are unlikely to quit. “Its easier to quit heroine than smoking,” he says.

“A 50-year-old smoker will smoke for perhaps 10 more years. If a child starts smoking he can smoke for 50 more years.”

According to the Pakistan Medical Research Council (PMRC), 54 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women use some form of tobacco on a regular basis in Pakistan. An estimated 80 per cent of smokers start between the ages of 18 and 20. Dr Saeed cited a recent survey which found that 24 per cent of high school children had tried smoking at least once. The youngest of these children were 12.

Schools

Nadia Rehman found a cigarette in her 12-year-old daughter’s pencil case four months ago. Certain that the sixth grader had got the cigarette from a friend at school, she contacted the principal.

“She refused to accept that my child had got it from the school and tried to put the blame on us, even though neither her father nor I smoke,” she says.

Since then, Rehman checks her daughter’s bag every day after school and tries to find about her friends. “Thankfully, nothing like that has ever happened again,” she says.

Clinical psychologist Dr Madiha Latif, who offers counselling services to various schools in Lahore, says children, especially teenagers, have an urge to try new things. “It’s human nature. But an attempt that usually starts as an experiment sometimes leads to addiction to hashish, heroin and other drugs,” she says.

She identified some of the causes as peer pressure or poor relationships with their mother or father. And when parents overreact to their children’s mistakes, they can push them further to addiction.

“Experimentation is alright, but continuing it is definitely off beam and parents need to learn how to deal with it,” she adds. She said that while many schools counsel their students in anger management and behaviour, they paid no attention to this important issue where children actually needed counselling.

The government’s role

MPA Dr Saeed Elahi, the parliamentary secretary for health, says the government is set to introduce a new law in the Punjab Assembly banning smoking in public places. “All preliminary documentation has been completed,” he said.

The Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smokers Health Ordinance 2002 lapsed because it was never made into an act.

Dr Elahi said that the Punjab government earns an estimated Rs3-4 billion annually from taxes on tobacco and the Health Department was considering raising the tax.

According to PMRC research, increasing the price of tobacco by 10 per cent can cut its consumption by over eight per cent. The federal government gets 0.7 per cent of its GNP from tobacco taxation, which is roughly the amount it spends on healthcare.

Dr Elahi said the provincial government was also cracking down on the use of sheesha, by raiding and sealing restaurants where it is smoked. He said that there needed to be more public pressure to eliminate smoking in public places. “If people can start smoking because of peer pressure, they can also stop smoking because of peer pressure,” he said.

Walk and seminar to raise awareness

King Edward Medical University (KEMU)/Mayo Hospital has organised a poster competition, a walk and a public education seminar on May 31. The walk will start at 9 am from KEMU’s Patiala Block and end at GPO Chowk. It will be followed by the poster competition and seminar at the KEMU auditorium.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 31^st, 2011.