By  Mary Sygall              NSW, April 2011

I noticed with horror that the Tobacco Companies are starting a new campaign to counter the Government’s attempt to lessen the wish of the young people to start smoking.

Well, let me tell you of my own experience with smoking. It’s not funny and it can happen to anyone.

I was always a very active woman, in work and play. That is, till 20/7/1989 - when out of the blue, I fell off my chair in the office of my workplace. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get up. My boss at the time, also my cousin’s husband, ran over and gathered me up in his arms and took me to his office to lie down. I heard him shouting that someone had to call the ambulance, because I'd had a stroke.

I spent the next three months in hospital and suffered the next 21 years with a severe physical disability. My life has come to a grinding halt since that fateful day back then. What I didn’t know and I'm still try to come to terms with, is how it makes my advancing years seem and feel so much more difficult. I'm not going to list my problems - that would be boring. I would just like to impress on all the young people, whom I can reach, that life can be totally destroyed by actions we don’t think of when we are young.

I started to smoke at around 12 years, on the sly of course then. My Mother would have killed me if she found out that I was smoking. Then, when I was much older I stopped, because I got married to a man who forbade me to indulge. When I divorced him, the first thing I did was to light up a cigarette. From then on I smoked continuously for decades - more and more by the day (I got to about two packs a day). But like many other people, I deluded myself that I could and would give it up when the doctor told me to "quit or else".

Well it didn’t happen that way.  I had no warning, no doctor’s advice. It just happened. Ever since then, I keep thinking that I wish I'd never smoked at all.

I also told myself that my Mother was nagging me and the oldies just didn’t want me to have fun. Even when I was a bit older, I remember how glamorous I thought I looked at the parties, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth, or holding one in between my fingers. I never thought it would cause me to live a much lower quality of life one day. Life can be and is beautiful in advanced years as well. If you're healthy and not disabled, you can have a love life as well, into your much advanced years.

And to think those big business executives are thinking only of their money and not of the countless lives they take or destroy, in their selfishness.  The Government has to be strong and go on with the campaign of deterring young people from choosing that way to kill themselves.

Please go on with the program of negative psychology in order to save people’s lives. 

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