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Derek Hawkins, Ann McDonald
and Charles Pelleschi |
I’M dead cool me and about to become a Real man!
I’m 13 and just about to have my first-ever drag on the half-smoked Player No6 being passed around by my mates behind the school science block during our lunch break. The adrenaline’s pumping, the hand’s shaking slightly as I excitedly yet nervously put it to my lips and lightly puff away, just like those cool film and rock star dudes.
However, ‘the man’ is almost immediately coughing for England, being slapped on the back whilst feeling sick with a spinning head and, quite frankly, wondering what the hell all the fuss was about.
It certainly wasn’t what I had expected, but in hindsight, I was the lucky one - it put me off ever wanting to have another cigarette and that’s one of the many true stories that I now recall for the benefit of the Year 6 students at Marchwood Junior School each year just before they leave and to go to ‘big’ school.
As trained smoking advisors, my HANDY Trust colleague Ann McDonald and I deliver a ‘Don’t Start Smoking’ preventative package for Year 6 students at Marchwood Junior plus those at Orchard and Wildground schools on the Waterside.
The package has a ‘Don’t Start’ theme but it also gives them all the necessary information to enable them to be able to make an informed choice about the many social, financial and health implications around smoking.
There aren’t lots of ‘boring lectures’ instead it is a very interactive 45 minutes with the students participating fully with their own questions plus visual aids and games to play.
These include the legendary ‘Jar of Tar’, a Chemical Game based on what chemicals make up a cigarette, plus the Smokalyser which measures the level of Carbon Monoxide in a smokers’ lungs.
This year, so that we could show how the Smokalyser worked, we enlisted the help of 16-year-old Charles - a former Marchwood Junior pupil himself six years earlier - to blow into the machine. Unfortunately, Charles didn’t get the advice that today’s students receive and he freely admits that he would never have started if had seen our ‘presentation’.
Taking a 16-year-old in to speak to the younger ones works well. It’s really effective to have someone very close to their own age telling them how it rules your life once hooked, how difficult it is to give up, how it makes your clothes and hair stink and how it drains every last penny of your pocket money etc, etc. What a 16-year-old today can tell them about the pitfalls and consequences of starting to smoke is so much more powerful coming from them rather than a recycled 1970’s teenager!
Finally, there’s the rather gory collection of coloured photographs that are always greeted with a chorus of ‘uuugggggghhhhhh!’ from the students whether they be Year 6 or Year 11.
My particular favourite is the one of the blackened toe that has been chopped off - yes there are 2,000 amputations every year in the UK as a direct result of smoking.
Cigarette anyone?
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