I’m sure Arbet wrote his latest contribution for Filipino Voices in jest, but he writes on a subject that is very, very close to my mind, my heart, my mouth, my fingers, and my lungs.

It’s a dated presentation, but Dr. Marina Miguel-Baquilod, who was the coordinator of Phase I of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted a self-administered multiple choice survey (I cringe at the thought, but I’m not a scientist), on 11,630 respondents ranging from 12 to 18 years.  The GYTS for the Philippines back then had some rather interesting findings:

• Four in 10 students, or 43% of the respondents, answered yes to having tried smoking.  For purposes of comparison: back then, the proportion of students who smoked in the Western Pacific region was 21.5% in Singapore, 22.4% in China, 32.8% in Fiji, 61.4% in Palau, and 79.8% in the Marianas.
• For the proportion of respondents who currently smoke, we rank second to the Marianas, where 39.4% of the respondents answered in the affirmative.  In 2000, Dr. Miguel-Baquilod’s study showed that 22% of the respondents currently smoke.
• More interesting statistics: 72% of the respondents believe that smoking is harmful, the same percentage believe that smoking makes one ugly, and 85% of current smokers want to stop smoking.

Because there’s a fascist inside of me who savors the sweet smell of power, let’s talk about our nation’s addiction to cigarettes.  Now there’s an issue more important that the Presidency!

(Deep drag of cigarette) Ah, yes… wanna bum one?  Here you go.

I know it’s flawed logic, but it is true: there is no one-to-one correspondence between the incidence of smoking and smoking-related diseases.  The reason why lung cancer and emphysema, among other diseases, are called smoking-related diseases is because the relationship is not direct; it is proportional.  You can get the same diseases a smoker gets from pollution or genetics.  Yet health is not the real danger of smoking.  Remember: smoking is not a personal issue, but a social one.

I wrote an entry on my blog before about smoking and the call center generation, but I would like to highlight a passage from that entry:

Tobacco is the quintessential American product.  It fulfills no appetite but the one it creates.  Predicting a throwaway culture, it is rendered useful only by being destroyed.  Along with autos, movies, jazz and striptease, it remains our abiding gift to world mass culture.

- “A Letter to Granddad, the Tobacco Farmer”
Allan Gurganus, New York Times
August 18, 1995

The truth to the matter is simple: the prevalence of smoking in the Philippines is not because of strictly personal choices.  Cigarettes exist, and are consumed, in a very social nature and manner, so much so that where you’ll find cigarettes, there will always be smokers.  The challenge that confronts our public health system, among other things, is to reduce the admittedly alarming incidences of smoking in the Philippines.

Back in May, Dr. Martin Bautista points it out in a very expert way:

From my perspective as a physician, there can be no filthier habit than smoking. Lung cancer, obstructive lung disease, coronary artery disease, osteoporosis, respiratory infections, oropharyngeal cancers are all directly related to smoking. While there are many who smoke in order to avail of the anorexiant properties of nicotine especially during these days of ridiculously high food prices and there quite a few who smoke to ward away the multitudes of hemorrhagic-fever-bearing mosquitoes, the adverse effects overwhelmingly negate whatever salutary benefits that smoking brings.

My view is that if we keep on treating smoking as something strictly personal, we can never get to a solution that embraces society’s smoking problems as a whole.  Addiction is not a personal problem; if it were, we wouldn’t have a problem and we could chalk up cigarette smoking to a grand scale of emo.  If a smoker gets addicted or dependent on nicotine, then society has a problem; it has at least one person who cannot function properly without a) committing a slow death, and b) an imagined fuel that his or her body has become dependent on.

If it were a personal problem, then it’s easy to quit; it’s like… hmmm… your-ex-was-in-a-room-with-your-best-friend-while-they-were-both-drunk-and-then-they-started-kissing-and-then-you-get-to-know-about-it-three-weeks-later-from-your-friend-and-then-you-start-smoking-more-cigarettes-from-your-usual-couple-of-sticks-a-day-habit-to-numb-yourself-from-the-pain.  Somehow, that’s not exactly how people start smoking.  People start smoking because of many reasons, the lot of which are social in nature:

• The relative cheapness of cigarettes
• The placebo/panacea quality of cigarettes
• The omnipresence (yes, more than even God Himself) of tobacco advertising
• The positive social stigma associated with tobacco products

So no, it’s not easy to quit when everyone else is smoking.  As a social problem, smoking must be addressed in terms not only of smokers, but of everyone.

To give due credit to The Government (OK, shoot me next time you see me), there have been many measures employed to keep people from the bad habit: taxation, importation tariffs, regulation, banning ads, et cetera, et cetera. But therein lies your problem: as long as there are cigarettes, there will always be smokers.  To fully enact a legitimate no-smoking law, you’ll have to either take away the smokers (OK, kill them), or take out the revenue-generating economy-floating cigarette.

Somehow, that won’t sit too well with too many people.  In the meantime, let me think this over… with a few cigarettes.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function p75HasVideo() in /homepages/39/d169067170/htdocs/voices/wp-content/themes/NewFV/single-default.php on line 57