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I grew up during the movie era of actors Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, John Wayne and others of their ilk. All had one thing in common. They played macho, tough, hard drinking and smoking characters, who always clobbered the bad guy, got the girl and rode (later drove) off into the sunset, as the credits crawled across the screen to the blare of triumphant music.
Smoking was portrayed in the media as chic or risqué for ladies and macho for men. Smoking made you wittier, sexier and was even a fashion statement that showed you were with it, part of the in crowd. When you began smoking, you had become of age this was the ultimate initiation into adulthood.
These impressions and beliefs drove to try my first cigarette (and alcoholic beverage) on arrival in form one at the ripe old age of 13 and all this in an attempt to impress girls. For peer wisdom had it that the easiest way to get a girlfriend was if you were a ‘tough guy’ one of which one of the main qualifying criteria was being a smoker.
Over thirty years later I look back at this period of my life and cringe. That is until I remember that ones teenage years are a time of uncertainty, of ones abilities, goals and destiny. It is a time of often disconcerting changes; hormone fluctuations, mood swings, onset of menstruation, breaking voices, pining for facial hair growth while more often instead more stress caused by lack of progress.
A time of trying desperately to fit in even while bucking and champing at the bit against parental reins. Nonconformity I remember was the order of the day with afro hairdos, bell-bottomed or flared trousers and six inch platform shoes. For those brave enough there was even an earring on one ear (I can’t for the life of me which one) but the wrong year denoted homosexual inclinations. However capping all this would always be the conspicuous, ever-present, confidently flicked cigarette.
For this too is the age of rebelliousness and experimentation. Trying to be older than you are. It is the age of tentatively and then with more confidence beginning to try and assert "I-am-not-a-child-any-more". Too true, one is not a child any more but neither is one an adult. You are trapped in that never, never land in between – a place whose occupants are called ‘teenagers’.
This hapless group called teenagers lay the foundation for their adult smoking years and subsequent ill-health (from minor ailments to death) during this period. Already at this time in their lives, teens are usually already enveloped in a cocoon of invincibility, a false sense of infallibility. This feeling of being ‘unbowgable’ as the hit group Gidi-Gidi, Maji-Maji baptized it only allows them to see the infinite possibilities and options that lie ahead. Options that of course do not encompass pain, disease and God forbid – death!
Such scenarios are only for old people to far no matter how hard to see no matter how much you peer hidden in the darkest recesses of the future. As a young person who has all their life to live they are too busy in the here and now investing heavily and whole-heartedly in the smoky present, for a disease-ridden future.
Obviously you do not smoke today and get cancer tomorrow. To realise any of the myriad health problems associated with cigarette smoking one usually has to smoke over a period of years and as a young person this was a Godsend. For I could enjoy the ‘tough guy’ successful, nimefika image now and worry about ill-health or death in that dim, distant, far away, hard-to-envisage future called ‘old age’.
Almost all my peers who still smoke today started at around this time in their lives. Some have quit the majority have not and most have been trying (some for well over a decade) to stop. For this is the age bracket at which most people will experiment and subsequently become addicted to the nicotine contained in cigarettes. Very few people start smoking after their teenage years and this is a well documented fact.
British American Tobacco (BAT) and other manufacturers know this very well and know that they cannot stay in business if the youth stop smoking. All they will have left if this scenario occurs is the already smoking adult population. But this segment alone cannot sustain the tobacco industry as daily they are giving up smoking with others dying as a result of cigarette related illnesses or old age.
In essence BAT, Mastermind and Cut Tobacco are targeting children – our children. Just as they targeted me way back in 1974 nothing has changed except that in the west where governments have woken up thanks to health experts and non-governmental organization’s activism to help their citizens. Thus these multinational companies have relocated to developing countries to peddle this drug as stringent laws are still to be put in place for most governments are still asleep or are arm-twisted by these companies to accept industry ‘self-regulation’ a euphemism for business-as-usual.
Right now BAT is at the forefront of marshalling everybody they can think of to fight the recently gazetted smoking restrictions by Health Minister, Charity Ngilu. The immediate result has been a thick, pall of noxious, billowing smoke that is threatening to obscure the real issues in a noxious blanket of misinformation.
Already the restrictions are being referred to as a ban, yet nobody has banned smoking. In truth it is actually places where one can smoke that are being restricted. That a warning be placed on packets stating that ‘smoking kills’. Hotel owners, the Kenya Association of Manufacturers, farmers, the previously unheard of Small Business Owners Group have all put expensive advertisements in the print media urging in a nutshell that the government give more time to implement these rules while also creating "a forum for the tobacco industry to present its views on the implementation of the rules".
How much additional time do these companies require? For the tobacco companies have fought against all attempts at restrictions for years. Yet they knew inevitably it must come. Now they are threatening to relocate. But we must not forget one fact smokers are a minority and non-smokers are fed up. How then do you fight an idea whose time has come?
Why must we constantly harp on the financial aspects which are also completely misleading? For according to the ministry of health, for every one shilling the government gets in tax from the tobacco companies it spends three to mop up effects of tobacco related illnesses where is the fiscal prudence here? You get six billion in taxes, and spend 18 billion in health care you are in the negative for 12 billion –every year.
But it is not enough that smokers have continued to smoke addicted hopelessly as children, but that non-smokers have had to put up with not only the acrid smell of burning tobacco but are actually now getting sick and dying for it as well. This is the main thing about restricting smoking in public places. Protecting non-smokers.
Yet we continue to argue that BAT and Mastermind and Cut Tobacco are ‘sincere’ and ‘benevolent’ fellows who really contribute to uplifting the Kenyan society. How do you embrace someone whose sole aim is to addict your children to a debilitating drug which will then give them a life of misery, take food from their children’s mouths as they feed their addiction and in the end kill most of them?
For this is exactly what they are trying to do and which Kenyans will see if they peer hard enough through this smokescreen that is so vigorously being thrown up to camouflage this.
Litigation in the United States of America led to the release of millions of pages of internal documents of these companies which were then placed on the internet. Browsing through these papers reveals thousands of startling facts hitherto kept under wraps and of which two examples easily illustrate the ‘sincerity’ of tobacco companies.
In "Some Thoughts About New Brands of Cigarettes for the Youth Market" by a C Teague Jr. of R.J Reynolds Tobacco Company, put down on the 2nd. Of February 1973, this youth-targeting is brought to the fore:
"A new brand aimed at the young smoker must somehow become the ‘in’ brand and its promotion should emphasize togetherness, belonging and group acceptance, while at the same time emphasizing individuality and ‘doing one’s own thing".
Then it proceeds on the premise, "The teens and early twenties are periods of intense psychological stress, restlessness, and boredom. Many socially awkward situations are encountered. The minute or two required to stop light a cigarette, ask for a light, find an ash tray, and the like provide something to do during periods of awkwardness and boredom".
Even as far back as the ‘60’s T. Osdene of Phillip Morris wrote about the reasons for smoking in "Why One Smokes, First Draft, 1969". It was almost like a blueprint for me to use five years later in form one. Osdene wrote:
"The first cigarette is a noxious experience to the noviate. To account for the fact that the beginning smoker will tolerate unpleasantness we must invoke a psychology motive. Smoking a cigarette for a beginner is a symbolic act. I am no longer my mother’s child, I’m tough, I am an adventurer, I’m not square. Whatever the individual intent, the act of smoking remains a symbolic declaration of personal identity".
Then comes the rider. “As the force from the psychological symbolism subsides, the pharmacological effect takes over to sustain the habit". In other words by the time you are thinking about stopping this experimentation and forgetting about cigarettes altogether you realise you cannot as the extremely addictive nicotine has got you ‘hooked’.
Why then do cigarette companies appear to campaign against youth smoking? They are not it is actually an exercise in ‘doublethink’. It’s actually all a brilliant gimmick. By campaigning against underage (is there any right age) smoking these companies cleverly succeed in marketing to children by simply positioning the product (cigarettes) as "adult".
I cannot put it more succinctly than the Ted Bates advertising agency of New York who said in part:
"In the young smokers mind, a cigarette falls into the same category with wine, beer, shaving, wearing a bra (or purposely not wearing one), declaration of independence, and striving for self-identity".
They went on to state that attempts "to reach young smokers, starters, should be based among others, on the following major parameters:
- Present the cigarette as one of the few initiations into the adult world
- Present the cigarette as part of the illicit pleasure category of products and activities
- In your ads create a situation taken from the day-to-day life of the young smoker but in an elegant manner have this situation touch on the basic symbols of growing-up, maturity process
- To the best of your ability (considering some legal constraints), relate the cigarette to pot (bhang), wine, beer, sex, etc"
A report of the Surgeon General (USA) in 1994 on ‘Preventing Tobacco Use among Young People’ leaves no doubt too about the vital need for underage smokers as the basis for survival of the cigarette companies.
In fact it says "cigarette companies are addicted to underage smoking. Almost 90 percent of all regular smokers begin at or before age 18, and hardly anybody tries a cigarette outside of childhood".
The Minister of Health Hon. Charity Ngilu must not give in to strong arm tactics being machinated by the BAT Company, including threats of relocation. For elsewhere this has been shown to be to the good of a nation as a whole as a result of the tobacco restrictions.
What this boils down to is that the time for clever semantics and obfuscations is over. It is time to act. The health of our children depends on what we do or don’t do. If we cannot protect them from cigarettes including the non-smoking ones with all the evidence at hand, what then can we protect them from?
David Ogot is a freelance journalist/producer who has personal experience with alcoholism. www.goinghomekenya.org
David Ogot,
NAIROBI.
30.-05-06
A condensed version of this article appeared under the heading Ngilu must stand firm on smoking restriction in the People Daily newspaper dated Friday september 1, 2006
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