Published The Advocate, November 5, 2005


IN MOVIES, cigarette smokers are the anti-establishment figures, the rebels – precisely defined by the tobacco industry and targeted at the youth market. The new anti-smoking ads now appearing on TV are aimed at the same market. In one, a young woman on a park bench gives the eye to a passing bloke. He spots her packet of fags, however, and keeps walking. Disgusted with herself, the woman crushes the pack and, abracadabra, she is last seen walking off with the guy to make babies. In another, a young man half-jokes about not being able to operate without a cigarette, and a surgeon looks at some x-rays and says: "I don’t think I can operate." The overlay reads: Quitting is hard. Not quitting is harder. The question is, do these ads make people give up smoking? Is a campaign to make smokers feel like idiots or feel guilty the best way to make them quit? Or does it just make them resentful and defiant? Teenagers will continue to smoke in defiance of medical wisdom. Teenagers think they are going to live forever no matter what. It’s not as if you light up your first cigarette and drop dead, just like that. There is no need to update your last will and testament beforehand, or to gather your loved ones around as you take that first puff. No, death from smoking is far more prolonged and painful than that. I watched my father die from smoking in his early 60s, as he had watched his father die in his early 60s, and I was keen to break the cycle. I had my last cigarette on August 24, 1998, after 20 something years of smoking. I stopped cold turkey. I drank lots of water and did deep breathing exercises. It worked. A mate tried using Nicorette chewing gum. It cost him a couple of thousand dollars in dental work to replace his fillings. I made no big song and dance about quitting in case I failed although I steered well clear of the pub until the automatic association of a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other had subsided. I was still struggling some weeks later when I told a drinking buddy I had given up. He said he hadn’t noticed. He said he had always noticed me smoking but had not noticed me not smoking. His theory was that some people looked as if they were born to smoke and I was not one of them. To him, I was a natural non-smoker. That cheered me up considerably. I am not in the least interested in smoking again. But you never know. The English journalist John Diamond – the late husband of celebrity TV cook Nigella Lawson – was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the tongue and throat. A life-long non-smoker, here he was with a smoker’s cancer. He immediately took up smoking, as I probably would in the same circumstances. My only regret in giving up is I never mastered the art of blowing smoke rings.