#picturebased

By Reinir Padua Friday, August 1, 2008

Celebrities joined yesterday the group supporting legislation that seeks to require tobacco companies to place photographs of victims of smoking on every cigarette pack.

Actress Bianca King, model Bianca Araneta-Elizalde, actor Onemig Bondoc, television personality Roxanne Barcello, and singer Champ Lui Pio distributed stickers featuring gory pictures of victims of smoking at Eastwood in Libis, Quezon City.

The celebrities also asked passersby to sign a petition in support of the pending bills in Congress.

The stickers showed photographs of a dead infant, a man with throat cancer and a bleeding brain.

Breathewell Initiative, a group of law students, is lobbying Congress to pass the bill that would require picture-based health warnings on cigarette packs to show smokers the risks they are taking when they smoke.

Elizalde said smoking among the youth is usually “driven by peer pressure and disinformation.”

“In the Philippines, there are few things to make people aware (about the dangers of smoking),” said Elizalde who also cited the current picture-based warnings on cigarette packs in other countries.

Barcello said one of the things that contribute to the wrong notion about smoking is the “glamorized” depiction of smokers in the media.

“Beautiful people (in advertisements and other media forms) make it (smoking) cool,” she noted.

Barcello said there are even cigarette brands that sell cigarettes in “nice pretty packages.”

“Here we have the same beautiful people like Bianca (Elizalde) doing this (campaign about the adverse effects of smoking),” Barcello said.

Elizalde said that with advertising playing a crucial role in encouraging smoking, its portrayal “does not make it look risky enough.”

“If commercials come out with the true effects (of smoking) I’d like to see how many people would still smoke,” she said.

Jessica Hilado, president of the Breathewell Initiative, said that a study is being conducted by the Department of Health to determine what kind of graphic depiction of these health risks will work to stop smoking, in the context of the Philippines.

Hilado said similar events would be held in different school campuses nationwide.

“We are trying to give smokers fair warning. The message on a pack reaches a smoker’s family and friends who will be exposed to the packs over 20 times a day,” she said.

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  Please visit The Breathewell Initiative site.