The cigarette habit

Press, 9 June 1977, Page 16

The cigarette habit

If everyone acted rationally, no-one would ever light a cigarette. No reasonable doubt remains that cigarette smoking is a major cause of lung cancer and that cigarette smoking fosters heart disease. Even so, some may be inclined to think that, if smokers want to trade off a few years at the end of their lives for whatever immediate pleasure or relief cigarette smoking may give them, the choice should be their business. But the habit frequently causes inconvenience to others, occasionally puts non-smokers to hazard, and increases significantly the costs of health care in New Zealand. Smoking is implicated as a factor in one of every three deaths in New Zealand. The Government has acknowledged that New Zealand would be a better place if fewer people smoked and has taken some steps to discourage the habit It has negotiated agreements with the tobacco industry to restrict the advertising of cigarettes. Last year the Health Department ran antismoking advertisements of its own and this year has published pamphlets emphasising the dangers of the habit. Late last year an advisory committee on smoking and health was set up. Warnings of danger to health appear on cigarette packets and cigarettes are heavily taxed. Most of these steps appear to be based on the assumption that if people can be made to think clearly about smoking, they will give the habit up.

If efforts to stop people smoking and, more important, to stop young people taking up the habit, are to be

effective, more attention must be paid to establishing why a practice which has been proved so thoroughly harmful to health continues to thrive. This might require sohpisticated, and expensive, psychological and sociological research. Even if such research threw up an idea that was partly successful in discouraging smoking the eventual savings would almost certainly pay for the research countless times over. Devising and sponsoring such a research programme might be the most fruitful way the new advisory committee could spend its time. Addiction to smoking will be broken only if the Government is not afraid to use all possible powers of persuasian. Action more forthright than guarded warnings and mild restrictions on advertising will be needed. Outlawing an entrenched habit is no answer, but as smoking is increasingly acknowledged as unacceptable or offensive among nonsmokers, and as it is banned in more and more public places, a climate will be created in which the addicts will find breaking the habit an easier goal. When more young people are persuaded that they will find more satisfaction and respect in maintaining nicotine-free good health than they will find in smoking a major campaign will have been won against the cigarette. When people who apepar to be interested in promoting fitness and health through sport and recreation decide not to accept sponsorship money from the cigarette industry the campaign will have been strengthened by consistent thinking and action.