Tobacco sales as usual

Press, 10 April 1980, Page 12

Tobacco sales as usual

PA Wellington National anti-smoking day on Tuesday seemed to be marked by a conscious effort not to light up by a few, but it was business as usual for tobacconists.

Throughout New Zealand, < manv responded to the Health c Department’s appeal to re- ( frain from smoking for the , day, but their sacrifice was 1 overshadowed by the hard-|. core who declined to stop. On 14 per cent of those who tr\ r to stop smoking last for three months, an American academic told a Royal Society function in Wellington marking national antismoking day. Applied to New Zealand, this meant 138,000, or 26 per cent, of New Zealand’s 750,000 smokers tried to give up within the last year, said Professor lan Newman, of the University of Nebraska. Only 29,000 of them managed to stop for three months and 169,000 'failed in their attempts. Throughout Gisborne city rffices there was an almost 100 per cent response to the ■ ■-moke-free call and it was rlso noticeable that fewer people were smoking in the | streets. However, elsewhere, several heavy smokers actually objected to the strong pressure being put on them. They sontended they would give ip when they chose to do so md one said he intended to •ive up for one day today ust to prove his point. The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) said yesterday norning that his Ministers light get heated' at times but hey did not smoke. There vere only three “occasional ■>ipe-smokers in the Cabinet, iut they did not light up luring meetings, he said. A week-end marijuana smoker risks his health less

than someone who smokes 25 cigarettes a day, says a World Health Organisation expert. Dr Daniel Horn, a member of the United Nations agency’s expert committee on smoking control, also sayi cigarette smoking aggravates every existing health problem as well as harming the healthy person;