BORACAY, Philippines — Boots Anson-Roa vividly remembers how she got into the smoking habit, and when she decided to stop.
As a young actress, she recalls, she was roundly berated by the film director Lino Brocka while they were rehearsing a scene for a play. Cast in the role of a socialite, she was supposed to show off her character’s “sophistication” by blowing off a cloud of cigarette smoke when the director interrupted her flow with an expletive. “Will you please learn how to smoke?” he asked her. “You look so fake doing that.”
“So I quickly learned and by the time the play was finished, I had picked up the habit, but only up to two or three sticks a day,” she told participants at “Glamour, Smoke and Mirrors: A Seminar on Women, Media and Tobacco” that just wrapped up at the Boracay Tropics Resort.
Boots would later get into TV and the movies, building a career based on virginal, long-suffering characters, until she became a fixture as the Virgin Mary in religious dramas. One day, she and her family, including husband Pete Roa, were dining in a restaurant and she decided to smoke after dinner. Suddenly, there arose a collective gasp from the family in the next table. “Oh my God, the Virgin Mary is smoking!” someone exclaimed.
“My children laughed and chided me for smoking in public,” Boots recalls, and so, cringing in embarrassment, she decided right then and there to quit the habit.
Sadly, Pete, who had been a smoker ever since they met on the TV show “Dance-O-Rama,” quit smoking too late. Felled by a stroke in 1997, he continued to smoke two packs a day until he was forced to give up cigarettes by emphysema. Some months later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away last year.
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Smoking and writing are often linked in image and perception. How often has the craft of writing been illustrated in movies by scenes of someone seated before a typewriter surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, a stick dangling limply from the lips of the writer, brow furrowed in concentration?
As a campus journalist, I was told so often by friends and fellow staff members that I could improve both my craft and output if I took up smoking. “It helps you concentrate,” I was told. Dutifully enough, I decided to give it a whirl. But between lighting the cigarette and placing it over an improvised ashtray, taking puffs now and then so as not to “waste” the cigarette, and wiping tears off my eyes from all that smoke, I found that smoking only interfered with my natural rhythm and broke my concentration. By that time, too, I had a boyfriend who not only did not smoke but hated the smell of cigarette smoke. “If you’re going to keep on smoking,” he told me, “I don’t think I can kiss you.” Much later, he shared with glee a saying he had come across: “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.”
I eventually married that boyfriend and never did find the need to smoke. And, growing up with two non-smoking parents, our two children didn’t pick up the habit themselves, even if they could have done so from friends and workmates. I remember hosting family parties in our home and having to scrounge around for makeshift ashtrays for my brothers. The living room would reek of stale cigarette smoke long after the guests had left, with the hubby wrinkling his nose in disgust.
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More than half of all Filipino men smoke, studies show, and while only 12-20 percent of women are smokers, cigarette marketers have targeted women and youth in developing countries to make up for the shrinking market in the developed world.
In Southeast Asia, the Philippines ranks second to Indonesia in number of smokers. China ranks No. 1 in the world, with India coming in second.
Even more alarming are the health consequences of smoking, which is, said Dr. Domilyn Villarreiz, a consultant of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, the leading cause of death in the world, linked to about five million deaths a year. In fact, 10 Filipinos die every hour of tobacco-related diseases.
Smokers kill not just themselves, said speakers at the seminar, but others around them as well. Secondhand or side-stream smoke, said Dr. Maricar Limpin of the Department of Health, is “six times more poisonous than mainstream smoke,” mainly because second-hand smoke interacts with the atmosphere before entering one’s lungs. “More than 90 percent of people exposed to second-hand smoke develop heart disease,” she said, noting that “there is no safe level of exposure” to tobacco smoke.
A legal scholar has even classified parental smoking as a form of child abuse, because children exposed to second-hand smoke are harmed, if not killed, by such exposure. The World Health Organization says children in families where at least one adult smokes “are vulnerable because they have no voice in the matter and they cannot protect themselves. As a consequence, children are exposed to numerous health problems including respiratory infections, asthma, chronic middle-ear effusions and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”
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A participant at the seminar mentioned that while she herself is not a smoker, her husband has been a heavy smoker for most of his adult life, and despite her efforts to get him to stop, from haranguing him with statistics to emotional blackmail, he has yet to give up the habit. It has reached a point, she said, that she has threatened her husband that if he does not stop before they celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary which is fast approaching “I will divorce him!”
We all cheered her on, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the husband, hopelessly addicted to nicotine and facing the prospect of abandonment. Then again, can you blame the wife for wanting to prolong her husband’s and her own life?
