What would stop me from picking up a cigarette?
Open their eyes
TO GET youth to banish cigarettes from their lives, it may help to give them a personal glimpse into the mess smoking can create.
While serving in the Red Cross back in secondary school, I visited a nursing home and met an elderly resident who used to be a chain smoker but was now suffering from lung cancer.
Showing me photos of his younger days, it was clear his sturdy frame had withered and the sparkle in his eyes had gone. He was lying in bed, wheezing and gasping, a shadow of his former self.
Speaking in Cantonese, he told me how the pain was a constant, and every breath hurt him like a piercing dagger.
I swore then never to take a puff. It’s one thing to laugh off a TV advertisement; it’s quite another to see for yourself, in the flesh, the enormous harm a lifetime of cigarettes can do.
All said, I’m not advocating that every youth has to go to a nursing home to understand the dangers of smoking. But perhaps such visits could be included in more school programmes. They go much further than we think.
Ow Yeong Wai Kit, 20, has a place to read arts and social sciences at National University of Singapore
Price it out of their reach
I AM not a smoker, but like others, I have been tempted to give it a try.
The only thing that has truly stopped me in my tracks is my knowledge of how much it would cost in the long term.
Assuming I smoke 10 sticks daily, the average number for addicted youth here, a pack of 20 costing about $12 will set me back $180 monthly, or $2,160 annually.
It does not take a maths genius or a financial whiz to tell you that that is a costly habit as compared to say, playing soccer or LAN gaming with friends. But given the number of youngsters lighting up today, clearly, they can afford it.
I believe the only true deterrence is to significantly raise the prices of cigarettes to $15 for those up to the age of 29. Only then will they realise that smoking is literally about seeing your money rolled up, burned and vanished into thin air.
This measure will deter many youth from inhaling that addictive first whiff of nicotine, and hopefully by 29, they would have matured beyond their childish whims and be dissuaded from taking up smoking by other factors, such as their wives and kids.
Keith Neubronner, 19, recently graduated with a diploma in communications and media management from Temasek Polytechnic
Friends will do the trick
CANING doesn’t work, raids cannot capture all of them, and they always plead ignorance of Singapore’s anti-smoking laws when caught.
But just as many youth pick up smoking because of peer pressure. I believe peer pressure is also what will prevent them from picking up their first stick.
I am strongly against smoking, but I must confess to having considered taking a puff, just to see how cigarettes tasted.
I chatted with a group of close friends – all non-smoking, anti-smoking girlfriends – and one of them said pointedly: ‘Bryna, are you crazy? What’s the point of ‘just trying’?’
Fine. I killed the thought on the spot.
Having friends who nag at you to stop, friends who threaten to ‘un-friend’ you if you keep smoking, and friends who have once smoked but given it up – that will do the trick. After all, many youth today value peers’ comments more than their parents’.
Bryna Sim, 22, is an honours student in history from NUS
Shock therapy
I WILL always remember our respiratory anatomy lab session in the first year of medical studies.
The dissected cadavers, all with tar- stained lungs, widespread cancer and severe emphysema, all had smoking as a direct or indirect cause of death.
I was then told by one of the respiratory physicians that most patients with asthma who smoke will never die of lung cancer only because they will never live long enough to contract it.�
‘Shock therapy’ is also used in Australia, where commercials show the possible gruesome effects of smoking.
Graphic pictures have also been used here, but why not organise school excursions to anatomy labs with actual diseased body parts and organs on display?
This will bring youth face-to-face with what they can readily dismiss on TV.
Tabitha Mok, 22, is a fifth-year medical student at the University of Western Australia
Take the parents to task
WHILE the HPB’s intentions are good, I feel that it is neglecting an important factor which determines whether or not youth take up smoking – the family.
Why? Many youth smokers pick up smoking because they have parents or relatives who smoke. These ‘role models’ saturate their children with cigarette smoke from a young age, which often leads to them picking up the habit when they grow older.
My maternal grandfather smoked two packs a day. His sons picked up the habit from him. My uncle smokes heavily, and his sons are all smokers. My father abhors smoking, and so do I.
Mere coincidence? I think not.
Current laws punish stall owners who sells cigarettes to underaged smokers. We should extend these laws to make it such that the parents are held responsible if their children are caught smoking.
For example, a parent who smokes and whose underaged child is caught smoking will be denied child relief for income tax; the relief can only be reinstated if both parent and child successfully quit smoking for an extended period of time.
A communal effort is more likely to work, and what better place to start than the family unit and where it hurts most – the pocket.
Jason Hau, 23, is a third-year communications and new media student at NUS
Tags: Bryna Sim, Jason Hau, Keith Neubronner, Ow Yeong Wai Kit, Tabitha Mok
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