DR.SARAH AND THE CIGS
All cigarette packets will now have to carry a message - rotated with other health warnings - 'SMOKING IS ADDICTIVE.'
Dr. Sarah Hodson of Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, was - until a few weeks ago - a nicotine addict. She smoked up to 25 cigarettes in a day during which she cared for patients dying from emphysema or lung cancer or having limbs amputated because of poor circulation.
She is now claiming $1,000 from the manufacturer of the cigarettes she smoked, and, if she wins, it could have a domino effect with other smokers claiming money from the tobacco firms they allege have hooked them on the habit. Dr. Hodson, 34, says: ‘I was 15 when I first started smoking - at a youth club in a small Western Australian country town. I smoked for the next 20 years. Nine weeks ago - with great difficulty - I gave it up.
‘For years I had tried every single day to stop.
‘Every morning I awakened with mucous at the back of my throat, and feeling dreadful, wishing I had not smoked the night before. I was always tired. And I suffered from sinusitis.
‘During the day I would not smoke. I was a nurse before I was a doctor, and worked in a respiratory ward, which should have been enough to put me off. It was really shocking to see men in their 40s and 50s who were smokers and who had been told they now had cancer of the lung. I felt very upset about it.
‘Nevertheless I was still young and naive and felt at that stage that my smoking history was not going to effect my health. I couldn't make the connection between my smoking and what I was seeing in the hospital.
‘Trying to give up to the urge to smoke in the evenings when I got home, I would use distractive methods: read a book or go into my bedroom which I had made a place where it was forbidden for me to smoke.
‘If I didn't have a cigarette, I felt something significant was missing from my life. I found it difficult to concentrate on my study, or even to write a letter without a cigarette.
‘I now understand why.
‘We actually use nicotine as a neuro-transmitter (a body chemical messenger that acts between a thousandth and 300ths of a second sending an impulse to the brain). Smokers recruit receptors for nicotine in the brain so that the brain prefers to use nicotine as a messenger between the neurones.
‘The brain gets used to having nicotine freely available and when there is none coming in, when you are withdrawing from the addiction, the body has to rely on its own neuro-transmitters and it gets lazy, having downgraded them.
‘A smoker trying to give up the habit, has to train these receptors again; that is why it is so hard to give up.
‘I see people in my ward who have had a leg amputated and they are out there in front of the hospital in wheelchairs smoking again, when it is just as likely they will have to lose the other one.
‘There are so many people who recognise the dreadful consequences and yet they are still smoking.
‘I see patients who have been diagnosed as having lung cancer - still smoking.
‘Now I am a little more sympathetic to these people (not being able to give up) because I have gone through it. It cannot be that they are all crazy or stupid. They are in fact the very proof of the addictiveness of cigarettes and nicotine.
‘I went cold turkey nine weeks ago and have not smoked since. I went to a smokers' clinic at St. Vincent's Hospital and had a most sympathetic one-to-one counsellor, the one person whose congratulations I can value.
‘Now I have asked the Consumer Complaints Tribunal to claim $1,000 from W.D. & H.O. Wills, who manufactured the cigarettes I smoked, for the cost of the clinic and the emotional and physical effects of withdrawing from nicotine addiction.
‘They said the claim would take 12 weeks to be finalised, but I have not heard from W.D. & H.O. Wills at all, though I was told they intended to make some gesture of settlement. If I succeed, hopefully a lot of other smokers will claim too.’
