Join the Great American Smokeout 2010

The American Cancer Society is hosting their annual Great American Smokeout today, November 18, 2010.  If you’ve been looking for a reason to quit, consider today it.  Don’t worry – I’m not here to preach to you as someone who doesn’t get it.  I started smoking about 8 years ago, oddly enough, while I was playing Rizzo in Grease.  (Who thought it was a good idea to give the performers real cigarettes?!)  Sure, I suppose I didn’t have to inhale, but I’m a method actor.  (Cough cough.)  Which is literally what happened after a while.  I started smoking “socially,” but don’t you know I just love to socialize?  Then I started buying my own packs, and smoking to relieve the stress of my temp job on Wall Street and the stress of my marriage, and yes, the stress of being a parent.

I did quit smoking while I was pregnant, but as the nature of tobacco addiction would have it, I started up again when my daughter was about six months old.  I’d only smoke after she’d gone to bed, and never in the house.  But then I figured, hey, if I can smoke outside, I can have one while I’m pushing her in the stroller.  When my daughter was little, we lived in Harlem, and I was far from the only parent who smoked.  My ex (who I was still married to at the time) didn’t make much of an issue about it, so I didn’t really have anyone encouraging me to quit.

And then in January 2008, just a few months after my daughter turned two, my Dad died of lung cancer.  Eight days after being diagnosed. Continue reading »

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The Great American Smokeout 2010: did you quit today?

Are you reading this on a smoke break? Consider making this cigarette your last. Today is the Great American Smokeout of 2010, a national day to band together and stub out your last cigarette.

If you’re a smoker, you’re probably well versed in the reasons to quit. For me, giving up cigarettes forever required one special reason: kids.

I smoked my last cigarette two weeks before I met my stepson. I’d quit half a dozen times before, and always picked it up again with a few months. This time, when the charm of not smoking had worn off and the stress of winter made me want to buy a fresh pack of cigarettes, I had a kid in my life. A kid I was really, really sure I never wanted to see smoking. Which meant, to me, that I needed to never smoke in front of him.

It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but every time I wanted to pick up a cigarette, even if he was far away, I’d think about him and pull back from that urge.

Continue reading »

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Will this picture keep you from smoking?

The Food and Drug Administration has unveiled 36 proposed new warning labels for cigarettes sold in the U.S. All of the new designs include pictures of various off-putting scenes — a mom and toddler surrounded by smoke, a man puffing smoke through his tracheostomy tube. They’re gross and mostly real, though there’s a cartoon of breast-feeder blowing smoke right in her baby’s face that comes across as exaggerated. (So does the cigarette-as-heroin-fix image.) Continue reading »

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Heigl Demonstrates Smoke Stick

Last night, actress Katherine Heigl became an unofficial spokeswoman for the “Smoke Stick” when she appeared on “Late Show with David Letterman.”

Puffing on the smoke stick, Heigl said she decided to quit smoking after adopting her daughter, 1½-year-old daughter Naleigh, from South Korea last year. But what is the Smoke Stick exactly? Continue reading »

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Remember Ardi Rizal, the so-called smoking toddler? The two-year-old Indonesian boy who smoked about 40 cigarettes a day?

Good news! After receiving special therapy, he has managed to kick the nasty habit, a child welfare official told AFP today.

In May, when a video of Rizal smoking went viral on the Internet, it drew international attention to the weak regulation of the tobacco industry in Indonesia.

Six months after his father gave him his first cigarette, the overweight boy was smoking two packs a day. Apparently, if his parents tried to take away his cigarettes, the boy threw violent tantrums. So where is he now? Continue reading »

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Most teens who try cigarettes have no intention of becoming addicted.  Smoking is just something they do for fun when they are hanging out with their friends.   And if you asked, they would probably tell you that while they are aware the health hazards related to smoking, they personally have nothing to worry about.  They are casual smokers who don’t light up enough to become addicted.

Or so they think.  According to a new study,  just how much it takes to turn that casual, just-for-fun smoker into a full-blown addict may be far less than previously thought.  Continue reading »

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