Tough tobacco laws are no use if they are not strictly enforced

Like many men of his generation, my grandfather loved rolling his tobacco in a piece of newspaper.

He would lather one edge with his saliva and make a nice stick. Then he would bite off the loose edges and viola! he had a cigarette, which he would promptly light up as we whiled away time in the grazing fields.

Sometimes, he would make two sticks and tuck one behind his ear, a gesture I came to admire.

Occasionally, my friends and I would gather all manner of dry wild leaves, which we would crash into tobacco-like pulp and make “cigarettes” of our own.

This habit, I believe to this day, led to the death of one of my friends who had lung complications.

Growing up, I found the Marlboro advertisements in magazines alluring. Often, they featured a bearded cowboy in blue jeans and wide-brimmed hat, riding a brown horse, rope in hand as he went after his herd.

He was, in a sense, a man’s man, conqueror of the great outdoors. He appealed to my herdsboy instincts.

As the son of a kiosk owner, I got my chance at a real cigarette at an early age. I took a stick from the blue Nyota pack with a star on the side and lit up.

However, the experience was far from pleasant and I promptly snuffed it out and was saved a life-long addiction after my first toke.

Still, as a teenager, I found the Aspen advertisements on television captivating.

One featured a young graduate in a gown, celebrated by his family and his love, doing all the things that I would have wanted to do as a young man.

SMOKING HAZARDS
There was also the Embassy advert, which featured a man in a white convertible, cruising on a flawless road, like those found in Kinangop, a damsel in red by his side. “Smooth all the way!” the advert said.

Considering all these influences, it is a wonder that I never became a smoker, yet I sold cigarettes for much of my younger life.

Indeed, I recall that during the attempted coup on August 1, 1982, I was on my way to buy cigarette supplies when I encountered adults running for their lives.

I ran back to the BAT shop and, being a regular, the shopkeeper opened the door to let me in.

I never let go of the bufa, the name we gave to the pack of 10 cigarette packets.

Years later, when my grandfather died of starvation induced by the cancerous growth that blocked his throat, I did not make the connection between his smoking and his demise.

The penny would finally drop a few years later when my grandmother died of throat cancer.

It occurred to me that she had been, for many years, a passive smoker on account of the fact that my grandfather often smoked in bed at night.

She was my favourite human being of all time but I had great difficulty mourning her passing because her death freed her from unspeakable pain.

For me, however, she remains the face of the human cost of second-hand smoke.

I still recall the hullabaloo that arose in 1988 after the then Minister for Health, Mr Mwai Kibaki, ordered that all cigarette packets must carry a health warning. This was considered a radical decision at the time.

AFFECTING LIFE EXPECTANCY
Decades later, Health Minister Charity Ngilu introduced even more drastic rules, which for a time led to a sharp drop in the price of BAT shares on the stock market.

The slide was reversed when the cigarette maker started paying dividends that were simply out of this market, so to speak.

The new rules published this week, which require cigarette manufacturers to publish graphic health warnings on the effects of tobacco use on their packs will no doubt go a long way in discouraging smoking, especially among the young and impressionable.

However, for them to be effective, agencies will need to enforce them robustly if we are to create a healthier and tobacco-free society.

Studies have shown a direct correlation between an increase in smoking and a reduction in life expectancy.

Prof Angus Deaton, author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, warns that lung cancer “is most strongly associated with cigarette smoking because very few people who die of lung cancer did not smoke”.

He also points out that lung cancer cases start showing up about 30 years after an increase in smoking trends.

“The mortality from smoking continues long after the behaviour has changed,” warns the scholar, who won the Nobel Prize for economics last year and who has also linked smoking to a rise in cardiovascular diseases.

Mr Mbugua is the deputy managing editor of the Daily Nation. [email protected].