Smoking Story
VO: Do you know what kills more Aboriginal people than anything else? Is it violence, drugs, alcohol, car accidents? It’s smoking cigarettes.
Smoking kills more Aboriginal people than any other drugs and alcohol combined. Then why do nearly half of Indigenous Australians over 15 smoke?
Some people think smoking makes you look cool or more grown up. Well this is what can happen to smokers. [graphic image of smoker with rotten teeth] Still think it looks cool?
If you smoke a pack a day, that’s about $6,000 a year. Think about what else you can buy with that money. But more importantly, smoking can take your life. At this cost, who can afford to smoke?
So what do they put in a cigarette? They use leaves from the tobacco plant that have a very strong chemical in them called nicotine. Nicotine is addictive and makes you want more, and more, and more. But that’s not all. Then they add more than 200 poisons including insect spray, toilet cleaner, lighter fluid, arsenic, and rocket fuel. Even that’s not all. In fact, there are more than 4,000 chemicals that go into one cigarette.
So how does smoking kill? When you smoke, all those chemicals go through your mouth, into your lungs and get into your blood. Then the blood carries them to your brain and it makes you feel good, and you want more, and more, and more.
But the blood also carries the chemicals all around the body and small lumps called tumours can start to grow inside you. The tumours can spread around your body and start killing you. These tumours are called cancer. Many smokers die from cancer.
Smoking makes your heart get weaker. It can’t pump the blood around your body properly. Many smokers die because they get heart disease or have a heart attack.
The lungs also get weak, and this makes it hard to breathe. Then you can’t play sport so well.
Smoking can also make it easier to get diabetes and other serious health problems.
The worst thing is, these things can happen to people who don’t even smoke. People get sick just from being around smokers. This is called passive smoking. One in every four people who die from cigarette smoke don’t even smoke.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders die earlier than non-Indigenous Australians. They also smoke twice as much.
When pregnant women smoke, it hurts the baby. The chemicals from the smoke go through the mother’s body and into the baby’s body. The baby can be born too early and it can get sick all the time. Too much smoking while pregnant can even kill the baby.
Twenty per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people will die from illnesses caused by smoking. That’s one person in every five. Will it be you? Your mum, dad, brother, sister, son or daughter?
Smoking is killing too many people, but it can be stopped. Keep culture and family alive. Quit today.