KEY POINTS:
For Sale on Trade Me: One Smokefree gear bag, several T-shirts spanning 14 years of Smokefree/Auahi Kore campaigns, and a Nicorette parka from a day's sailing on the Maxi Yacht when it used to be sponsored by Pfizer.
And the reason I've had to change jobs and get
a new wardrobe? I had a kid. Tiraha, my daughter, is 2 1/2 now, and Hone Harawira's TOA (Tobacco Out of Aotearoa) dream to end the import and sale of all tobacco products is not going to happen quickly enough.
Tiraha's world is pretty much smokefree now - except for The Warehouse Extra staff huddled out the back of Sylvia Park shopping centre, smoking in the carparks.
Tiraha hasn't asked me yet what it is these people are doing. She doesn't see smoking on Playhouse TV. None of her daycare staff smoke, which is why she goes there rather than to a kohanga reo.
There's only one aunty in our immediate whanau who smokes and when she visits she wears a nicotine patch to minimise the number of times she goes outside.
I don't want this smoking-doesn't-exist lifestyle shattered by smokefree interventions aimed at Tiraha through pre-school, primary or even intermediate.
I wish now we hadn't pushed the smokers outside to smoke in public in front of children, like the many teachers, who nonchalantly take their coffee and cigarette out to the school entrance to get their fix. And people think smoking by kids is rebellious.
I've just attended a two-day think tank on what we should do next to reduce smoking. There's a lot of support for the phasing out of tobacco, which is great. But what's to be done for people who cannot break their addiction?
Some of my colleagues think we should encourage existing smokers to switch to snuff (available in nasal and oral forms) which is less dangerous to their health than smoking.
But we'd have change the Smokefree Environments Act (1990), which bans the sale of the more attractive oral snuff products like Sweden's Snus.
As always, we need the tax on tobacco to be raised to make tobacco products less affordable and my colleagues want a lot more advertising on television.
I was once wary of introducing a wider range of highly addictive tobacco products for young people to get hooked on, but now support smokeless products. These will eradicate the secondhand smoke issue. So let's do it.
As for more mass media, I don't want Tiraha seeing anything related to smoking, be it tobacco products decorating the wall behind the man in the dairy who sells her an ice block, or an ad on TV put out by the so-called "anti-smoking" lobby.
Like the recent ad that said, "If you have to, you can smoke as long as you take it outside." I bet the boys at British American Tobacco loved that one.
Well, sorry. It's not okay if you smoke around or in front of me and my girl. Go back into your house, or your car, or your toilet, and smoke there.
I don't want her to see people smoking, snuffing, snusing, sharing their flavoured nicotine gum or flouting their patterned, coloured nicotine patch.
You can take your "Smokefree" this and "Quit" that off TV and put them out of sight, too. Keep the advertising for nicotine addicts on their cigarette or snuff packets, or use direct marketing techniques.
The only messages from the past 15 years of campaigns promoting smokefree that I'd be happy to see promoted are ones that promote healthy whanau like the old and forgotten, "The only thing you should light up around them is their eyes."
In our whanau, smoking is a thing of the past, and I don't want some well-meaning health promotion person making it a thing of our future.
* Dr Marewa Glover is director of the Auckland Tobacco Control Research Centre at the University of Auckland's School of Population Health.
