Give mom a cigarette break

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 296 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

The first rule of the Secret Smokers Mother’s Club is that you don’t talk about the Secret Smokers Mother’s Club. At least you don’t talk about it to anyone who is a non-smoker and especially to mothers who are non-smokers.

Like Alcoholics Anonymous, none of the mothers who secretly smoke are willing to share their names. It makes sense, since many of them have kept their secret for years. “I never smoke in front of my kids. Never. No one in my life knows I smoke, except for one person and that is my husband. But no one else,” says one member.

According to reports, one in two smokers hides their habit from friends, family and colleagues. And, boy, do these women go to great lengths to keep this secret from their children. “If Noah is watching television and my husband is with him, I’ll take out the garbage, then run around the house and hide in the bushes, because I don’t even want my neighbours to see that I’m a mother who smokes. I feel disgusting about it,” she admits.

But that hasn’t stopped her from smoking, even after two children, and she has no plans to quit. “Because you know people judge smokers anyways, but mothers who smoke? To non-smokers, they’d consider that worth stoning me.”

Club members end up doing a lot of unnecessary chores to get their fix. “I’ll run out to the all-night grocery store,” says one mother. “I’ll tell my husband we’re out of milk, but usually we are anyway. And this store is not close. I don’t go to the store near my house, because I worry I’ll run into people I know. I go to another grocery store that takes me about 30 minutes to get there, so I get a couple of cigarettes in before I go back home.”

But do they notice the smell? These mothers resort to more subterfuge to mask the lingering aroma of smoke. “As soon as I come back from smoking, I wash my hands, my chest, I brush my teeth, and I have clean shirts all over the house, so I can immediately change into one of them,” says one mother.

Another member’s purse could be mistaken for an Avon lady’s kit because she has so many supplies. “I keep a small tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. I have a big bottle of body lotion that smells like vanilla. I have face cream that I rub all over my face. And I have a body spray from Victoria’s Secret that I spray in my hair and all over my clothes.”

This mother also got a great tip from a makeup-artist friend who sometimes smokes. She now carries around Downy April Fresh or Bounce sheets meant for the dryer. “I rub it on my hair and it works amazingly well. Also, they are really small to carry around, which makes it easier.”

If it takes so much energy to keep smoking a secret, why not just quit? These women know the health risks and they have children they’d like to see grow up. “It’s the one last thing of my old life,” explains one. “It’s mine and it’s all mine.” Another adds, “Because I sometimes like to be bad, and as a mother you can’t be bad.”

Then there is the dark side of the addiction. “I really love smoking so much,” says one. “I sometimes find that I’m waiting for my kids to take a nap so I can go smoke. And as awful as this sounds, I’m excited my son will be going to daycare in the afternoons this fall.” Another admits that when she’s having a nicotine fit, she loses her temper with her children more often.

But even though they puff away in secret, they look down on mothers who smoke openly around their children. “When I see a mother smoking, all I can think is, ‘You disgusting wretch,’ ” says one. “When I see a mother smoking and pushing a baby in a stroller, I’m horrified. But who am I to judge? At night, I’m in the bushes putting out my cigarettes in a beer bottle.”

No smoking, please

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

ABC

You can show anything on network television these days—except lighted cigarettes. The producers of ABC’s new show Pan Am, about stewardesses in the 1960s, have announced that the network will not allow them to show the characters smoking. Producer Thomas Schlamme told Entertainment Weekly that this is “the one revisionist cheat” in a show that will otherwise try to get period detail right. Though TV characters on shows like Two and a Half Men are sometimes shown smoking cigars, cigarettes have become taboo on broadcast television due to what Schlamme calls the “impressionable element,” the fear of influencing viewers. (It doesn’t help that, unlike liquor, cigarettes can’t be advertised on TV, so the networks can’t make money plugging the products.) But shows on cable have no such fear of bad influence: the characters on Mad Men light up all the time. Of course, it helps that hardly anyone is watching.

Iceland considers relegating smokes to the pharmacy

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 8:35 AM - 4 Comments

When it comes to draconian anti-smoking rules, no country has considered going as far as Iceland. This fall, the country’s parliament will debate a radical new proposal that would outlaw the sale of cigarettes outside of pharmacies, where they would only be available with a prescription. The bill, sponsored by former health minister Siv Fridleifsdottir, aims to “protect children and youngsters,” she says, and to stop them from ever taking up the habit.

Iceland, however, is not alone in throwing up new barriers to smokers. In Australia next year, cigarettes will be sold in plain, brown packaging, prohibiting the use of tobacco industry logos, colours or brand imagery. In Sweden, surgeons refuse to treat smokers; patients are given blood tests to ensure compliance. Finland, meanwhile, is hoping to ban smoking entirely by 2040.

The Icelandic proposal also suggests treating tobacco smoke as a carcinogen, restricting it the same way the country does other known cancer-causing agents. The bill, however, may never see the light of day. A spokesperson for the Icelandic Ministry of Welfare said the proposal, although “very serious” and backed by the Icelandic Medical Association, has little chance of passing.

What she meant to say

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 10, 2010 at 12:23 PM - 16 Comments

On September 28, the Globe reported that provincial health ministers had been told by that the federal government would not be moving forward with new warning labels for cigarette packaging. When NDP health critic Megan Leslie asked about the apparent cancellation that day in the House, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq ignored the question. A month and a half later, Ms. Leslie asked again about the apparent decision and again Ms. Aglukkaq ignored the question.

This week though, in the wake of a CBC report that tobacco company lobbying preceded the apparent reversal, Ms. Aglukkaq told the House that “additional health information on labels is still under review” and “an announcement will be made soon.”

Butting out in Havana

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Enrique de la Osa/Reuters

When Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba’s military leader and president, Fulgencio Batista, in January 1959, he and his brother Raúl made a pledge to each other: their socialist model of governance would not make Cubans wealthy but could provide each citizen with basic necessities. A little more than half a century later, with Fidel slowly making his way back into the public spotlight after a lengthy illness, Raúl is in the process of altering that promise to preserve his country’s future. He has called for the elimination of all state-related subsidies that impoverished islanders have relied on for decades. The country’s ailing economy, one plagued by bureaucratic inefficiencies and the effects of the global financial crisis, is to blame.

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Elaine McCoy's straight-talk express

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 11:03 AM - 15 Comments

The Alberta senator insists on applying fact to the great cigarillo debate.

So, what exactly are the facts behind Bill C-32? Proponents of the bill insist that smoking cigarillos leads children to increase their cigarette addiction. Yet Health Canada’s own research fails to support their allegation. According to the latest Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey, the trend line for cigarette smokers under 18 has remained virtually flat over the past four years … As to cigarillo consumption … the latest survey clearly demonstrates that most Canadians who buy and consume flavoured tobacco products are of legal age to do so…

Call me a level-headed legislator, if you like, but I must say I prefer to base my decisions on evidence.

Best Cigarette Advertising Campaign Evah

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 9 Comments

This was just e-mailed to me, and I can’t believe I didn’t think to look for it online: my favourite cigarette ad campaign ever, Camel’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels!” campaign. I first heard this on an old tape of Abbott and Costello radio shows from the ’40s, and this is the TV version. It is essentially the same as the radio version — same slogan, probably even the same announcer — except that it ends with a shot of a woman who is either not a doctor or the most elegantly-dressed medical professional in the world. Because one of the early rules of TV advertising was to get a hot woman into the commercial, no matter what the product was.

You have to admire the incredible jiu-jitsu technique involved: promoting a product whose biggest flaw is being bad for your health (even before the smoking-cancer link was discovered, it was accepted that cigarettes, like alcohol, were not particularly good for you) by claiming that health professionals love it.

Smoke more! It's good for the economy.

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Everyone must smoke! That’s the edict a Chinese county government seemed to issue recently when it ordered state employees to puff their way through 23,000 cartons of locally made cigarettes over the coming year.

To make sure every bureaucrat complied, Gong’an county, located in the central province of Hubei, even set out a monthly consumption plan. Most departments were ordered to smoke 400 cartons monthly, and schools received a 140-carton quota. At $29 a carton, the plan was slated to force workers to buy $670,000 worth of cigarettes this year. Organizations that failed to reach their target would have their budgets cut, while fines of $170 would be levied against functionaries caught puffing unapproved brands, reported the ChuTian Metropolis Daily.

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Dying stores morph into smoke shops

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

When convenience stores across Canada were forced to cover up their cigarette displays by “power wall” legislation, their sales sank. But some businesses in New Brunswick have found a novel way to fight back. They’re doing an end run around the laws banning tobacco displays by shutting their doors to kids and getting licences to convert their convenience stores into smoke shops.

Canadian Convenience Store Association president Dave Bryans says it’s “a desperate move” by a sector that’s suffering through a huge crisis. The combination of a nasty recession plus tobacco advertising legislation has dealt a lethal blow to the stores, and they’re doing whatever they can to survive. New data shows that during the past seven months, 1,875 independent stores across Canada have closed. In Ontario, 765 have shuttered since May, wiping out a full 12 per cent of independents. In Alberta, 223 have closed; in New Brunswick, 58. “The small business model is in true jeopardy,” says Bryans.

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Choose your vice wisely

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

The above picture was taken moments ago at my favourite depanneur in the world, just around the corner from the Maclean’s Montreal office. Ginette (not the woman who is pictured) owns the place and was one of the handful of deps in the area that managed to get the cigarette companies to pay for the new grey panelling covering the coffin nails. The new coverings are ad hoc billboards on which anything, save for tobacco, can be advertised. So Ginette, the genius behind the $4 breakfast club sandwich, has begun displaying lottery tickets.

There is a certain cough-inducing irony about being able to replace one vice with another, the depths of which Richard Martineau plumbed in a column last month. It’s doubly so, since Loto-Québec, the state’s official arbiter of games of chance, began handing out large LCD screens runnig adverts for their wares to depanneurs at about the same time the new cigarette law came into being. (“Why did they do that?” I asked Ginette one night. “Because they have too much money,” was her reply.)

In order to prevent the practice of one addictive activity, the new cigarette panels have become billboards for yet another. God bless all those smart bureaucrats.

Menthol cigarettes target teens, study finds

By Kate Lunau - Friday, July 18, 2008 at 11:59 AM - 0 Comments

teen smoking

New research from the Harvard School of Public Health suggests that tobacco companies used menthol—an additive that can help mask the harsh taste of cigarettes—to hook younger smokers.

“For decades, the tobacco industry has carefully manipulated menthol content not only to lure youth but also to lock in lifelong adult customers,” said Howard Koh, associate dean for Public Health Practice at HSPH and co-author of the paper, titled “Tobacco Industry Control of Menthol in Cigarettes and Targeting of Adolescents and Young Adults,” which will be published in the Sept. edition of the American Journal of Public Health (and is now available online).

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