tak nak! tak nak!

next time, you are offered a cigarette, say loud and clear “tak nak! tak nak!”.
(note: “tak nak” in our local lingua, means  “don’t want”)

‘tak nak!’ meaning  ‘don’t want’ is going to be a 2-words mantra for school children to say no to smoking. our PM, pak lah said this when he was launching the anti-smoking campaign on 9 feb.

“whenever someone offers you a smoke, say ‘tak nak!’ instead of feeling
ashamed, feel proud. say tak nak! 10 or 100 hundred times if you have to”, so says pak lah.RM100m had been allocated for this five year anti-smoking campaign which cover education, exhibition and advertising.

pak lah said that the govt. was worried too many young people had taken up smoking, therefore the need for this campaign. although this campaign is targeted for school children, pak lah cautioned adults to take heed of this campaign too, as adults have to lead by example.

in another related cigarette story, prof. dr rahmat awang, the coordinator for clearinghouse for tobacco control, ask malaysia jeff ooi’s comments. btw, interesting read there something about PAS issuing fatwa that smoking is haram.

yes i’m anti-smoking and i hate people smoking. i used to source articles on smoking in papers and magazines and cut them out and pasted them in a scrap book. i have 3 of the scrap book now, filled with articles of the dangers of smoking and so on. and do you know, last time i used to have no smoking signs on my purse and bike! crazy eh. well i suppose carrying along a card that reads “dear smoker, do you know your cigarette smoke is also dangerous to non smokers around you? sidestream smoke contains higher concentrations of poisons. if a non smoker breathes in smoke from 20 cigarettes everyday, the chance of getting lung cancer is doubled. non smokers do not wish to die from smoking related diseases.” (i got that card from CAP – consumer association of penang) is not so crazy, so i did carry it then and now.

if you want me to lecture you on the dangers of smoking, that there are more than 1000 chemicals a cigarette contains, about sidestream smoke and mainstream smoke, about passive smoking, blah blah blah, i’m good at it.

yes i know, smokers do know the dangers of smoking and all the blah blah blah i’m good at blahing, and yet they continue smoking. why? some said it’s a habit they can’t kick (they are too addicted to nicotine then), some said i’m killing myself, not you, so mind your own business (they haven’t heard of passive smoking then), some have the don’t care attitude… die die lah (they have no thought of their loved ones then) and so on. of course there are some who genuinely wants to stop smoking but receiving no support, they can’t let it go.

one of the reason i’m anti-smoking is because my father passed away mainly because of too much smoking. my father rarely smoke cigarettes but he smoked cigars a lot. when he was young, he like to smoke er… how do you call it eh… don’t know… a kind of leave (?) yellowish or beige in colour cut into little rectangle; put in some tobacco leaves and rolled it up to become a smoking stick!! (for want of a better name. it can’t be call cigarette nor a cigar lah). as a young man he smoked that a lot. i remember when i was a little girl, sometimes i used to help him roll the leaves too! then when he gets older, he stop smoking this and switched to smoking cigars. almost everyday he would be seen with a cigar. don’t want to go into the long story of what happened, what kind of complications and so on but the conclusion was that his death was labeled as ‘cancer of the lungs’.

so you can understand now why i’m against smoking. not that i like to nag and grumble at smokers but if i do, it’s for their own good anyway. trying to help them. do you know beside having your health improved if you stop smoking, you will also be saving up a lot on your money. you see, let’s say if a person smokes 15 cigarettes a day, in 20 years, he will smoke 100,000 cigarettes. which is roughly about RM10,000 – enough downpayment for a house!! yes, smoking is a slow and expensive way of committing suicide (or some say it is committing suicide in installment).