Anti-smoking activist is going cross-country
Anti-smoking activist Errol Povah brought his run to urge people not to smoke to Duncan Tuesday, June 1.
He looks like a long-distance runner and he’s running at least as far as to Montreal but Povah said he’s not an athlete.
“Maybe, I can actually call myself one in five or six months, when this is done,” he said.
His run began May 31 at Mile Zero in Victoria, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the World Health Organization’s World No Tobacco Day.
Although he hasn’t been running all that time, Povah has been working for a smoke-free world for about 30 years.
Asked if he’s finding more support now than he did 30 years ago, he’s positive.
“Absolutely. Certainly in terms of smoke-free public places and workplaces, we’ve come a long way. The bottom line is: nobody has any right to expose the rest of us to the 4,000 chemicals which are in tobacco smoke, 40 of which are carcinogens.”
Smoking’s often deadly side effects are well known now but external pressures often push people towards taking up cigarettes.
Particularly vulnerable in North America are women, especially young women, he said.
“The whole business around the word ‘slim’ in cigarette advertising is aimed at vulnerable young women who are still very much persuaded by any number of factors, even Hollywood movies where the tobacco industry is paying them huge amounts of money,” he said.
It’s been 46 years since the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on the dangers of smoking came out.
Now, the World Health Organization is predicting that the annual death toll from tobacco, which currently stands at 5.4 million globally, will double within the next 10 years, Povah said.
“This is primarily as a result of what the tobacco industry is doing in third world countries where it’s virtually unfettered. No rules. No regulations. They just go in and give cigarettes away. I’ve heard of cases of concerts by western artists where the entrance fee will be five empty cartons of the sponsor’s cigarettes. It’s obscene, what the industry is doing there.”
Povah has a lot of sympathy with young people. He, too, felt the pull of peer pressure when he was a boy in Nanaimo but was lucky to heed his inner voice and not take up smoking himself.
Pressures have eased some from the days a few decades ago when smoking was almost a right of passage to adulthood. Tobacco advertising in the 1950s and 1960s was endemic.
“The Flintstones did tobacco ads. Ronald Reagan did tobacco ads, long before he got into politics. Some of those old ads talked about how certain brands would soothe your throat,” Povah said.
He and his support team are planning to cross Canada to Montreal and then, time and resources permitting, go from there to New York City.
The reason: to hit the headquarters of big tobacco companies in both Canada and the U.S.
BY LEXI BAINAS, THE CITIZEN, June 4th, 2010, canada.com