By LISA SIMPSON STRANGE
GLASGOW — Almost 1,000 people in Kentucky will die this year as the result of smoking. Not because they smoke themselves, but because they live or work with people who do.
That was the message Dr. Melissa Walton-Shirley, a Glasgow cardiologist, and other volunteers wanted to make clear to local residents on Friday when they displayed 980 assorted pairs of shoes in front of the courthouse on the square.
“Right now, we have to really take advantage of opportunities like these to make a statement,” Walton-Shirley said Friday morning. “The truth of the matter is that about 1,000 Kentuckians in the next year are going to die just because they live with or work with someone who smokes in the same building. It doesn’t even have to be in the same room.”
This was the first year this type of visual display has been set up on the square, according to Taotafa Tamminga, a nurse practitioner with Cardiology Associates in Glasgow, who was one of the volunteers manning an information table at the event. She said it was important to make people understand how detrimental secondhand smoke is to patients with heart-health issues.
“I see a lot of patients who continuously come back in — reblocking their stents, their bypass grafts, their stents in their legs — and they’re struggling to quit smoking and the reason (is) the patients are usually willing to quit smoking, but the family members are not willing to stop smoking around them,” Tamminga said.
It’s difficult enough to stop smoking in the best of circumstances. When constantly surrounded by the temptation, it can be nearly impossible.
“The environmental smoke is hindering their ability to quit smoking. A lot of them come in and say, ‘I want to quit, but my son lives at the house ... my mom lives at the house. They’re all smoking and I can’t quit.’ So unfortunately, family members are not helping their loved ones to quit smoking,” Tamminga said.
Raising public awareness of the need for the passage of legislation mandating smoke-free businesses was one of the main priorities of the display for Walton-Shirley. The costs for smokers and non-smokers alike are too great, both for their health and monetarily, she said.
An Associated Press story two weeks ago noted the percentage of smokers in the country had risen this year for the first time in 15 years. Teens, age 19 and younger, make up the majority of those new smokers.
One in every four teenagers in Barren County now smokes, according to Walton-Shirley.
“If we are able to enact smoke-free laws, which ban smoking in public buildings, that gives teenagers less of an opportunity to ever become hooked,” she said.
Angel Carter has been smoking for 12 years. She started when she was just 15 years old. Carter took a few minutes to exchange points of view with Walton-Shirley in front of the display Friday morning, along with her father, Fairley Piercy Sr., and her mother, Patricia Piercy.
A lit cigarette dangled between the fingers of Carter’s right hand, which she held down by her side as she talked. She punctuated her sentences by bringing the cigarette to her lips and inhaling deeply. Giving up smoking is not something she’s interested in right now.
“They cost a lot of money,” she admitted. “But if it wasn’t for cigarettes, I wouldn’t be able to make it through the day.”
But Carter did have a novel idea on how to cut down on tobacco usage — legalize marijuana, she said.
Walton-Shirley is a strong advocate for legislation prohibiting smoking in businesses and other public places to protect the health of non-smokers and give more incentive for smokers to quit.
City council members passed a resolution in the spring of 2008 urging businesses to become smoke-free, but they tabled indefinitely an ordinance, by a vote of 6 to 5, that would ban smoking in public areas and workplaces. Walton-Shirley believes it is time to revisit the issue.
“Our city council here has an opportunity to decrease the amount of people who die from it (smoking), who are sickened from it and to save millions of dollars in the next few years, if they will just make the city smoke-free,” she said.
A total ban is the only way to be successful, she said.
“I have to make one really serious point. You cannot enact a partial ban. It has to be a comprehensive ban of every single workplace in this city in order to protect all patrons and all employees,” Walton-Shirley said.
Councilman Freddie Norris voted against putting the smoking ordinance on hold last year. He knows firsthand what secondhand smoke can do. Although he has never used any kind of tobacco product himself, his father was a heavy smoker and Norris grew up in a home filled with smoke.
“I inherited all of that secondhand smoke. Although I never smoked, I still am affected and I’ve had four bypass heart surgeries,” Norris said.
The change resulting from becoming a smoke-free community would be twofold, according to Walton-Shirley.
“Two things happen when you enact a smoke-free ordinance. Many of the people who are smoking will quit, but more people will never start,” she said. “And if (we) don’t start with that today at Ground Zero, we’re never going to change this area if we don’t make a dramatic change in our local legislation.”
Walton-Shirley said perceptions about smoking are changing locally, if slowly, for the better.
“Walking by here this morning, we’ve had several people who have stopped to congratulate us, shake our hands, thank us for what we’re doing. Four years ago, that would not have happened. We would have been heckled,” she said. “Seventy percent of our population here does not smoke. When we took our survey here in town, we had upwards of 90 percent of the people we surveyed who said, ‘We agree with you. We want your help.’ ... Even smokers have said, ‘We don’t want anyone to suffer the fate we’ve suffered.’”
But not everyone supports Walton-Shirley’s efforts to make Glasgow and Barren County smoke-free.
Fairley Piercy Sr. said his constitutional rights are being trampled because smoking has been banned in the local courthouse. He said he thinks people should be able to make decisions about where they smoke without interference from any governing or judicial entity.
“We’re grown, we’re not children,” he said.
The children are the ones who sometimes suffer the most, however, according to Walton-Shirley.
“The one thing that I lament today was that I did not get my crib out of the attic (to add to the display), because somewhere in Barren County in the next year a newborn child is going to die because their parents took it home from our hospital and smoked. And that crib death will occur within 12 months of their going home,” she said. “For the children who survive that, their parents will smoke enough tobacco products by the time they’re 18 that they could have given them a college education.”
Along with the short- and long-term negative health effects, smoking also takes a toll on a family’s financial and educational well-being, according to Walton-Shirley.
“Poverty and lack of education and smoking all go hand-in-hand in this area and it is so easy to change. It costs nothing to change. Yet the benefits are so great. And the reason we know that is because in Lexington, when they went smoke-free, their asthma admission rates to the emergency room dropped by 27 percent. Now three to four years later, they have saved $22 million dollars in the city of Lexington alone from just going smoke-free,” she said.
Are the majority of non-smokers willing to continue to suffer the negative consequences of the minority’s behavior? That’s Walton-Shirley’s question.
“It’s time that we sat down and had a frank conversation about what direction we want Glasgow to take. If we want to continue with the death and the dying and the 31-year-olds having five-vessel bypass surgery, we need to continue exactly like we’re going right now, but if we want to change our area for the better – become progressive, healthier, save health care dollars – we have to enact a smoke-free ordinance,” she said.
And grandparents should live long, healthy lives and get to see their grandchildren grow up, she said.
“We should not continue in an era where it’s permissable to be 40 years old with four stents and a bypass surgery and still smoking. No. 1, we can’t afford it and No. 2, the children of those patients deserve to be able to show their parents their children. And that’s not happening an awful lot around here. We’re having a lot of people who never live to see their grandchildren because they’ve continued to smoke and they’ve died,” Walton-Shirley said.
A two-pronged approach is what is needed to succeed with a smoke-free movement, she said.
“We know already what works. ... Taxation. Smoke-free legislation. It’s worked in every city in the world where it’s been implemented,” Walton-Shirley said. “In New York City, one inner-city high school decreased their teenage smoking rate by 80 percent – that’s 8-0 percent – within a year of passing their smoke-free ordinance. So if you combine taxation with a smoke-free ordinance, you save bundles of cash and you save thousands of lives.”
Before people can change bad habits and learned behavior; however, there has to be a shift in thinking in the world around them and in which they live.
“The most important thing is, we really have to drive culture change here. We have to do it. We’re morally obligated to try to help,” Walton-Shirley said.
