Guest editorial: Smoking no adult choice

Cigarettes are the wolf in sheep's clothing of the drug world.
Unless you live deep in the countryside, the local seller is never further than your local store. The glossy branding, ease of purchase and even the warnings on the packs give the impression this is a regular product, albeit with a few (understated) risks.
The reality is smoked tobacco is the most harmful drug to health in New Zealand today.
We worry about our kids experimenting with illicit drugs, yet the average age to start smoking in New Zealand is 14.
If those children keep smoking, there is a one-in-two chance it will kill them. In fact, about 4600 New Zealanders will die this year as a result of smoking. That's one every two hours.
People know cigarettes kill, they know they make you smell bad, turn your teeth yellow, block your lungs with tar and clog up your arteries with fat.
You can't escape the grim images plastered over the packs and hammered into your home in every ad break on TV. At around $12 for 20, the average smoker is burning nearly $2500 a year.
Walk past any office back door on a rainy day and the smokers are huddled in the cold to grab a drag on their cigarette.
Surveys regularly show people want to quit. In fact, if every smoker who said they wish they could stop did so overnight, we'd cut tobacco use by two-thirds.
Yet despite all of the disadvantages smoking offers, nearly 20 per cent of New Zealanders are still lighting up on a daily basis.
So why are so many of us still smoking?
The tobacco industry tells us this is because people choose to keep smoking.
"It is an adult choice" is their often repeated mantra. This glosses over their role as the purveyors of New Zealand's most prolific and harmful drug.
A role that sees decades of experience refining a product to attract young smokers, taste smoother to mask the harshness of inhaling smoke and most of all keep people addicted.
Think of smoking the other drugs people fear.
The reason addicts smoke P, or crack cocaine is because this is the best way to get the drug to your brain. Smoking tobacco does the same thing for nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarette smoke.
The Royal College of Physicians concluded that nicotine in cigarettes is as addictive as crack cocaine or heroin.
It is not harmful itself, but it is the tobacco company's friend as it keeps you smoking tobacco. It is the contents of the tobacco smoke that do the damage.
Illicit drug users had years of experimenting to find the best ways to use their drugs. The tobacco industry had years and the added advantage of billions of research dollars to show them the best way to deliver a nicotine fix in a cigarette.
This is a product engineered to keep you coming back for more - and to keep you contributing money to tobacco industry coffers, no matter the health and monetary cost. Sounds just like the drug dealers we don't want our kids ever going near.
Couple this with billions of dollars in global product marketing, branding and distribution and the tobacco industry shows what can be achieved when you are dealing legal drugs. In 2010 the world's largest tobacco company made more than New Zealand's GDP.
Smoking is not an adult choice, as it is kids who start. Yet we allow cigarettes to be sold in every dairy, convenience store and supermarket.
Clever packaging portrays lifestyles of glamour, freedom, escape and holidays to recruit the young smokers needed to replace the ones who keep dying.
Once hooked, cigarettes are hard to quit.
The Government has agreed a goal of a smokefree New Zealand by 2025. To achieve this New Zealand needs to treat tobacco like the harmful drug it is. This means dumping brands that appeal to kids, getting rid of prolific tobacco sales, hiking the price and providing smokers with safe forms of nicotine to help them manage their addiction.
Smoking is a major public health problem - one that can be prevented by controlling this deadly drug.
You should be as afraid of your children trying cigarettes as you are of them picking up a P pipe, or needle.
Statistically, smoking is way more likely to kill them.
Ben Youdan is the director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).