Smoking, Young Lungs, and Our Students

I have personal as well as professional reasons for writing a blog about the impact of smoking on young people.

My father smoked from the age of 14 and died of a smoking-related disease. I was ten-years-old when a doctor told him, in front of me, to stop smoking otherwise he would be dead within six months. It had a profound effect on me.

In the UK, there remains a cultural problem with alcohol, but much less of a problem with smoking. In Italy, it seems the other way round. Here the smoking culture is still very strong. 

One of the striking features of the recent pandemic here was that the police might stop someone who was not wearing a mask properly, but if someone was smoking this seemed almost to grant a valid excuse and give a licence not to wear a mask. 

The irony is, of course, that many more people will die of smoking-related diseases than will die from Covid. Yet there are no decrees about this, even though it is clear from recent experience that governments have the power radically to change the way people behave.

Of course, smoking is against the school rules. It is damaging reputationally to the school when people see our students smoking. Do I care about that? Absolutely I do. And if students break those rules, then there will be consequences.

We regularly patrol, with a rota of staff, the area around the school to ensure our students are not openly smoking in uniform.

And I am delighted that very few of our students seem to smoke compared to when I arrived here six years ago.

But my main motivation in addressing this issue is not, of course, the school’s reputation but the students’ health.

Smoking damages young people’s lungs before they have fully matured.

I could quote hideous statistics. We already know that smoking kills – it says so on the packet. In fact, clever marketing by the tobacco industry has made this mortal threat a secret part of the appeal – giving it a kind of gothic romance and reckless sense of cool.

However, there is nothing romantic or cool about seeing someone in hospital with lung cancer who can’t breathe because of years of smoking cigarettes. And incidentally I don’t know anyone over the age of 35 who does not wish they could stop smoking.

There is also the moral argument – one being that if you smoke, you are much more likely to go on and take illegal substances, which clearly would have more serious consequences. As such, cigarettes can be a ‘gateway’ to harder drugs.

The other ethical aspect of smoking (and to taking drugs) is that it implicates the user in a system of production which can be problematic and morally compromising.

Taking drugs implicates people in a criminal network, where one directly contributes to the profit of criminal gangs.

Students should think about what and who they are supporting when they buy and smoke cigarettes. The tobacco companies feed on and exploit ignorance, exporting ill health, particularly to economically less-developed countries, whose citizens have less access to education compared to our own.

Teenagers famously think they are indestructible. It takes courage, moral strength and personal bravery to say ‘no’ when people in a group offer you cigarettes. But if students can be strong, then they might be saying yes to 10 more years of adult life.

So, if we care about our children’s health; if we care about the moral implications of smoking and what it helps to support, then we owe it to ourselves as a community to help students make the right choices.

As a school, we are determined to look after your children. 

I make no apology for writing about this. Indeed, I would like to enlist your help in combatting the smoking culture and reinforcing the message that it is cooler not to smoke and infinitely better for one’s health.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO