Tag: cigarette

• Ex-chain smokers relive battle with cigarette addiction
• Smoking kills more people  than terrorism -Investigation

Cigarette smoking kills more people annually worldwide than terrorism, and this is an evidence-based fact. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) reports, cigarette smoking kills about eight million people annually worldwide while the highest number of deaths recorded from terrorism was 32,864 in 2018, according to data provided by Statista, a German online platform that specialises in data gathering and visualization. In spite of the staggering death figures and attendant health crises, tobacco companies keep amplifying their CSR and marketing strategies, especially online where young population is dominant.  As the world marks ‘World No Tobacco Day 2025’ today, INNOCENT DURU shares stories of chain smokers who have quit the habit to help those  still stuck to the addiction and risk contracting terminal illnesses or dying.

Mohammed, a corporate event planner, was lured into smoking cigarettes when he was in secondary school.

As a rural young boy going to a boarding school in an urban setting, shedding the toga of a village boy soon consumed Mohammed as he mixed with the city boys whose hobby was cigarette smoking.

“I started smoking through friends, because my father wasn’t smoking. I didn’t know about cigarette smoking from home. I got to know about cigarettes in secondary school, because we were in a boarding house.

There, you have boys who come from the city. I  was from one village where I had not seen a cigarette before and  met those kinds of boys.

“Before I  knew it, I  started smoking,” Mohammed said.

After his initiation, Mohammed said “I  smoked for more than 25 years. I think it got to a point, let’s say, I smoked  on the average, about 15 sticks  per day.There was a time I felt cigarettes were  helping me to go to the toilet; that without it, I would not be able to defecate. But it’s merely a psychological thing, it’s not true. After quitting, I still defecate without smoking.”

He noted that he smoked for such a long period because among his fellow smokers they had a saying that “something must kill somebody. It could be cigarette, drug addiction, sex or anything else. In spite of all the campaigns,  this wrong belief made me and others to stubbornly stick to smoking.”

Mohammed also noted that his love for alcohol also fired up his addiction to cigarettes.

“Normally, smoking goes with drinking. If you are drinking and smoking, you believe that the smoke is helping to high you alongside the drink. If you watch, when people are drinking, they smoke a lot,” he said.

After more than two decades of smoking cigarettes, Mohammed decided to end the addiction when he realised that there was no gain in it.

“Generally, people have habits, and it is normally health issues that lead them to stop. But I just decided to stop smoking.

“I think it was a revolution on my part, because the point is, I just felt I was tired of drinking.

“So now, if I’m going to stop drinking, what is the need for smoking? So everything went together.

“I stopped smoking  about 15 years ago. There was no gain in smoking; nothing at all.”

After the first three months of stopping cigarettes, Mohammed said he observed that “my throat used to do me somehow reminding me about smoking.  But I ignored it. That ended the urge.”

He replied in the affirmative when asked if he felt healthier without cigarette. “Yes,”, he roared. “I’m healthier. I feel healthier, because, you know, when I was smoking, I was drinking too. So, I cannot really know the effects separately. Many people who go through this thing, they don’t come out like that.”

Mohammed said  as a father, “I cannot encourage my children to  smoke.  No right thinking parent would encourage their kids to smoke, because it is a bad habit.

“Smoking is bad. Can’t you see the campaign all over the world about smoking? I was  just stubbornly smoking cigarettes back then, that’s all.”

Like Mohammed, John, a media executive, also started smoking cigarettes from secondary school.

Read Also: Serious reforms in FCT transportation sector coming – Wike

The pattern of  people learning how to smoke from secondary school informs why tobacco companies engage in aggressive campaigns online where young people are massively active. It is also  not surprising why the internet is flooded with pictures and videos of young people, including females, passionately smoking cigarettes.

Sharing his experience, John said: “I started smoking in the second year during my secondary school days. It was peer pressure that made me to start smoking.”

Like Mohammed, he said: “I was so addicted to cigarettes that I wouldn’t be able to use the toilet without smoking. I was also not feeling satisfied if I ate without smoking cigarette. When I woke up in the morning, the first thing that would enter my mouth was cigarette. It was a terrible addiction.”

Recalling how he subdued the die-hard habit, he said: “I quit smoking not because it gave me any health problems but because smokers are often stigmatised. People tend to avoid them.

“Once they perceive the smell, they will move away from you or make a sarcastic statement that I didn’t like. They would relate every bad thing, even those you know nothing about, to you. 

“Again, going to church also helped me to overcome the addiction. Now, I don’t feel comfortable staying around smokers. It is irritable.”

The story is not different for Francis, a businessman, who said: “I took to smoking when I mixed up with friends whose hobby is smoking.  They always competed to know who was the best smoker. 

“They competed to see who had the capacity to puff out the smoke in the most unusual way. If you coughed while engaging in those deadly competitions, you were seen as a weakling,” he said.

Francis said after many years of addiction to smoking cigarettes, “I saw that my set of teeth was having embarrassing colours that made people to easily identify one as a smoker.

“I always felt sad when people, especially females that you were interested in, asked if you are a smoker, because your teeth give you out even without the smell that comes with smoking.”

Music, Nollywood stars quit cigarette smoking

Many people who engage in smoking because of what they watch in music and other kinds of video may be shocked to learn that many of their models are quitting the habit.

According to Nigeria Tobacco Control Alliance platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video and Showmax providing streaming services on the go, contribute to tobacco promotion through various channels.

“One key avenue is product placement within popular shows and movies. As characters smoke on screen, they glamourise tobacco use, potentially influencing viewers, particularly the younger generation.

“The normalization of smoking in entertainment content serves as indirect advertising for tobacco products.

“One population segment the tobacco industry continues to aggressively target is young people. The industry uses movies to portray smoking as cool and sophisticated, luring young people to trying tobacco.

“It is important to note that these efforts to normalize tobacco on screen can lead to increased smoking initiation, addiction and long-term health harms.”

Frontline Nollywood actor, Pete Edochie, is one of the people who have done away with cigarettes.

“I smoked for 21 years before I quit, and each time I got tensed up, I looked for a cigarette, and psychologically I was puffing away the anger.

“But there is no other thing it does for you physically except to destroy your lungs,” the veteran actor said in an interview.

Among popular entertainers who have publicly renounced smoking is Yeni Kuti, daughter of the late Afro Beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. 

“Before my daughter went into the university, I used to smoke and suffer chest pains,” she said in a newspaper interview. “I was like if I continued smoking, I might die before my daughter graduated.

“That was the inspiration I needed to stop smoking, because for years, I had been telling myself that I would stop smoking on the first day of January, but by January 4, I would return to smoking.

“But this time, I didn’t wait for January 3 or 4. I simply told myself that if I continued smoking, I would die and never see my daughter graduate. That was just too important for me, so I just stopped.

“I have stopped smoking for three years. The fear of not being able to educate my child gave me that inspiration. I was like, who will educate this girl if I die?”

Another Nollywood veteran, Zack Orji has also parted ways with smoking. Zack said he experimented with cigarettes and Indian hemp but quit the bad habits when he realised that they only caused more harm than good.

“I quit smoking because at a certain time, it was no longer pleasurable. As a matter of fact, I discovered that anytime I smoked over the years, I fell sick.

“I gave it up the first time for three years, then I relapsed. But I finally stopped three years after I got married.

“I just discovered that anytime I smoked, I did not feel comfortable with myself, so I gave it up.”

It will also interest young music lovers desiring to start smoking that some of their hip-hop idols have signed off from the habit.

Top on the list is frontline music sensation Kizz Daniel who shared a video of himself disposing of cigarettes via his verified Instagram account.

The singer explained to his fans that smoking is not cool.

He said: “To celebrate my birthday, for the sake of my kids and people that love me genuinely, I quit.

“Those of you still struggling with the addiction, it is not cool and it is not good, trust me. May God save us.”

The testimony of Korede Bello, a youthful artiste, speaks volumes about the need for young people to quit cigarettes.

He told of how  his father’s health made him to quit the act of smoking.

Korede said: “My dad used to smoke a lot of cigarettes, and as a child, he used to send me to get him cigarettes.

“I noticed something then: he used to cough a lot. So I’d ask him, ‘Daddy why are you coughing?’ and he’d tell me ‘it’s because of the cigarette. So if you don’t wanna cough like me, don’t smoke.”

Tobacco industry targeting young generation to find replacement consumers -WHO

The World Health Organisation in a report last year raised concerns about the tobacco industry targeting the young generation to find replacement consumers in order to maximise profits.

“To find replacement consumers and generate a lifetime of profits, the tobacco industry is targeting the young generation.

“The industry uses sleek marketing campaigns with  new media tools and harmless looking products designed to appeal to young people, thus creating a new wave of addiction.

“Hooking the next generation”, a new report jointly launched by World Health Organisation (WHO) and STOP, a global tobacco industry watchdog, highlights how the tobacco industry designs products, implements marketing campaigns and influences the policy environment to help them addict the world’s youth.

The report shows that globally, an estimated 37 million children aged 13-15 years use tobacco, and in many countries, the rate of e-cigarette use among adolescents exceeds that of adults.”

The report noted that tobacco industry markets tobacco and nicotine products as less harmful novel products, like gadgets or toys in attractive packaging.

“In reality, evidence shows that these products sold in fruit and candy flavours, and intensively marketed on social media platforms are hooking young people across the world.

“Nicotine contained in tobacco is highly addictive and tobacco use is a major risk factor for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, over 20 different types of cancer, and many other debilitating health conditions.

“Tobacco and nicotine products sold in any form are addictive and cause diseases and death.”

Tobacco industry manipulative -Don

Prof. Catherine Egbe of the School of Public Health, University of Cape Town, South Africa, exposed the manipulative nature of tobacco industry during a webinar on ‘World No Tobacco Day 2025’ attended by our correspondent on Wednesday, 

She said: “The industry, when scientists started getting a glimpse of what was happening with cigarettes and disease, they started doing PR. 

“So they employed a very highly placed PR agency or firm called Hill and Norton. 

“They designed what the industry should do in order to make people not believe what the scientists were saying about the addictiveness of their product, about the harmfulness of their product. 

“So, one of the promises they made was that if they found that cigarettes were harmful, they were going to stop making cigarettes.

“So you can see several of their CEOs, their presidents at different times of the year saying that they would stop making cigarettes should they confirm that cigarettes were harmful.”

The interesting thing, the don said, is that they already knew many years before the public even started getting a glimpse of it. 

“So it’s also important to mention that the industry was not just using a naturally occurring product that is available for people to just put into a paper and smoke.

“They were also engineering the products to become more addictive.  They were tweaking the nicotine so that it would become more addictive. 

“And in their document in the 1960s, this one is 1963, they admitted that nicotine was addictive and that they were selling an addictive drug.

“Guess what happened in 1994 when they were summoned to the U.S. Congress to say, you are selling an addictive product and you never disclosed that these products were addictive or harmful.  They said they never knew that nicotine was addictive.

“They all raised their hand and swore that they believed nicotine was not addictive.

“Remember, this was in1994. But in 1963, they already admitted.  And in 1997, even recently, they are still saying, oh, we will shut down our company.

We’ll shut down our manufacturing if we know that cigarette causes cancer.”

Continuing, Prof Egbe said: “The interesting thing is that as part of the propaganda machine, they have now come to accept that these products are addictive and harmful.

And this was taken by me from the South African website where they mentioned that combustible cigarettes pose serious health risks, and the only way to avoid them is not to start or to quit.  So they admit.

“But now they don’t admit with the position of going back to the drawing board and stopping to produce these products.  They still spend billions to propagate, to promote, to advertise, to hook, especially in Africa and other low and middle income countries. 

“Africa, because they have a growing young population and our laws are weak.

So they transitioned from cigarettes to other forms of tobacco or nicotine products as a way to avoid all the troubles they were getting from cigarettes.”

Going down memory lane, she said: “As some of you may be aware, in 1998, they settled out of court for a class action suit against them.  They are paying billions, even to date, for selling their products to children, for targeting children, for advertising to children, and for not disclosing the harmfulness of their products.

“They are doing this in the United States. And the big question I always ask whenever I mention this is, was it only in the United States that their products killed people? Did their products not kill people in Africa and other parts of the world? Why are they not being held accountable? 

“Instead, when they come to this country, they are trying to reinvent themselves. 

“They are trying to reinvent themselves even in other countries. But here in Africa, they are trying to really use the reinvention to have a leeway.”

Tobacco kills eight million people annually

The World Health Organisation has described the tobacco epidemic as one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, “killing over 8 million people a year around the world. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.3 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.”

WHO noted that all forms of tobacco use are harmful, and “there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco. Cigarette smoking is the most common form of tobacco use worldwide. Other tobacco products include waterpipe tobacco, cigars, cigarillos, heated tobacco, roll-your-own tobacco, pipe tobacco, bidis and kreteks, and smokeless tobacco products.”

While agreeing that tobacco kills in large numbers, American Lung Association said “but before you die, you could experience some pretty terrible diseases and health conditions from smoking. The association listed the most gruesome diseases caused by smoking to include lung cancer, noting that more people die from lung cancer than any other type of cancer.

“Cigarette smoking is the number one risk factor for lung cancer; it’s responsible for close to 90% of lung cancer cases.”

Other health challenges caused by smoking, according to the association, are chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, stroke, asthma, reproductive health in women, premature, low birth-weight babies, diabetes, blindness, and over 10 other types of cancer, including colon, cervix, liver, stomach and pancreatic cancer.

WHO, in one of its recent reports, noted that there is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry’s interests and public health policy interests.

“The tobacco industry produces and promotes a product that has been proven scientifically to be addictive, to cause disease and death and to give rise to a variety of social ills, including increased poverty.

“The scale of the human and economic tragedy that tobacco imposes is shocking, and also preventable.

“The tobacco industry is fighting to ensure the dangers of their products are concealed, but we are fighting back.”

Terrorism kills 361, 010 in 17 years, tobacco kills 8million in one year

Calculations from the above data provided by Statista regarding the number of fatalities due to terrorist attacks worldwide between 2007 and 2023, show that a total of 361, 010 people have lost their lives to terrorists globally in 17 years while cigarette smoking, from WHO’s reports,  annually wastes eight million lives. This revelation shows why governments across the globe need to  commit more resources and energy to addressing the disaster that the tobacco industry is causing to man and the environment.

Tobacco industry exploits loopholes in Nigeria

In its bid to regulate the tobacco industry, Nigeria has enacted tough regulations against cigarette advertising and consumption. Some of the regulations that were designed to check the industry include Nigeria’s National Tobacco Control (NTC) Act which was signed into law on 10 June 2015 covers several areas of tobacco control including regulation of smoking, the prohibition of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, regulation of tobacco products, contents and product packaging, licensing, and protection from tobacco industry interference, among others.

Regulations for implementing the Act, which came four years after and is now known as the National Tobacco Control (NTC) Regulations 2019, provide more clarity on stakeholders’ obligations for effective tobacco control.

Nigeria is also a signatory to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) which entered into force on January 18, 2006.

Incidentally,  there are exceptions in the law regulating tobacco entities, the most notable of which can be found in Section 12(2) of the National Tobacco Control Act, 2015. The section states, among others, that the provisions of subsection (1) do not apply to communication between manufacturers, retailers of tobacco or tobacco products and any consenting person who is 18 years of age or above.

Laudable as these efforts are, the Executive Director of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) Akinbode Oluwafemi, in a recent report of the organisation regretted that the players are exploiting the loopholes. His words: ‘Whilst Nigeria’s National Tobacco Control Act and its Regulations have largely checked the activities of tobacco corporations and entities, the industry has exploited some weaknesses in these laws and gaps in the system to interfere in tobacco control.”

One such tactics, Akinbode noted, “is the tobacco industry’s use and loud celebration of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities in the media and on social platforms as a way of enhancing its image to attract unsuspecting individuals, thereby creating a perception of the industry and its products as responsible and desirable. These CSR initiatives are further promoted by the endorsement of state authorities, who associate and collaborate with the industry to execute socio-economic empowerment programs.”

Checks showed that tobacco companies support initiatives aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity, empowering smallholder farmers, and promoting food security in parts of the country while encouraging tobacco leaves cultivation. WHO in 2023 lamented the rising number of arable lands devoted to the planting of tobacco leaf in Africa. According to WHO Africa Regional Director, Dr. Matshidisho Moeti, “while the area under tobacco cultivation decreased by 15.7% globally, in Africa it increased by 3.4% from 2012 to 2018.”

This ugly development no doubt contributes to food insecurity and rise in cigarette addiction in Nigeria where cigarette smoking, according to reports kills  28,876 people annually.