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Deny, from Bukit Duri, East Jakarta, was still in elementary school when he took his first puff of a cigarette.

“I was 9 and curious because a lot of people in the neighborhood smoked every day,” Deny says.

Unlike some smokers who go decades without the damaging effects of their habit catching up to them, it only took Deny a few minutes. Shortly after inhaling the clove cigarette, he says he became ill and vomited blood. Over the course of the next month he felt leaden and weak, and began losing weight drastically. His concerned parents took him to a health clinic where a doctor told him his illness had been caused by the cigarette.

It was the last one he smoked …. for a few months. By the time the next school year rolled around, he found himself surrounded by friends who had picked up the habit. Peer pressure worked its magic, and Deny has been puffing ever since.

The skinny boy is now 15, and dropped out of school years ago.

Azhari, a 17-year-old student at a technical school, also started smoking when he was 9. He says he was forced into the habit by friends.

“They said they would call me ‘faggot’ if I did not smoke,” Azhari says.

Azhari and Deny are only two among many young Indonesians who begin smoking at a startlingly early age. A study by the National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas Anak) reports that between 1995 and 2004, the number of smokers aged 5-9 increased fourfold. Indonesia is known for its robust tobacco production and is the third biggest tobacco consumer in the world, with more than 60 million Indonesians consuming 240 billion cigarettes in 2008, according to the World Health Organization.

These teenagers say they are all too aware of the negative impact their habit is having on their health, as well as how hard it is to stop.

“Every time I play football, I feel like I’m going to faint,” Deny says. His friend, Ucok, also 15, agrees.

Deny and Ucok have been living in a tough neighborhood on the banks of the Ciliwung River since they were born. Both dropped out after elementary school, refusing to continue their studies because they said the teachers did not treat them fairly. Now they fill their days playing around or hanging out at a nearby children’s center, learning percussion. They also help adults in the neighborhood make compost across the river.

Every day, they light up frequently. The first cigarette comes after they’ve had breakfast, the next ones follow when they have a break. They either buy cigarettes per stick or ask friends if they have any.

As they have grown, so has their addiction. Deny says he has tried to quit, but hasn’t made it more than four hours without lighting up. Ucok adds that the fasting month of Ramadan is the hardest. He constantly craves cigarettes and sometimes breaks his fast at midday, desperate for a puff. Both boys say they can smoke half a pack of Djarum Super clove cigarettes, a brand preferred for its cheapness, in a day.

Young smokers have been in the public eye recently, most notably through the shocking case of a smoking, cursing 4-year-old in Malang, East Java. The boy, named Sandy, lived in a slum, surrounded by adults who gave him cigarettes. After a public outcry, he was placed in a rehabilitation program at Saiful Anwar Hospital in Malang for a month. On Thursday it was announced that the toddler would be sent to an Islamic boarding school to prevent him from falling back into his old habits.

Seto Mulyadi, director of Komnas Anak, says cases of young smokers like Sandy are just the tip of the iceberg. “After we discovered the Malang case, we started to get reports of early-age smokers in remote villages. For example, one of the reports said there was one-and-a-half-year-old in Pangkep, Sulawesi, who has been smoking,” Seto says.

Seto says that tobacco company advertisements offer encouragement to teens and children to start smoking. Just last month, the commission persuaded Adrie Subono, from music promoter JAVA Musikindo, to cancel a cigarette company’s sponsorship of a Kelly Clarkson concert.

Komnas Anak is among the third-party organizations that have been working on a tobacco bill — currently under discussion at the Ministry of Health — hoped to curb the spread of tobacco use. According to Seto, the bill has three main goals: to ban cigarette ads, promotion and sponsorship; to ban smoking in public; and to augment the written warnings on cigarette boxes with graphic depictions of diseases caused by smoking, such as the pictures of sore-filled mouths found on packs of cigarettes purchased in Singapore.

Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, a member of the National Commission of Tobacco Control and the Indonesia Tobacco Control Network, says the bill aims to regulate the distribution and promotion of cigarettes, similar to alcohol.

“Health Law No. 39, passed in 2009, is a national recognition from the government that cigarettes, specifically tobacco with nicotine, are addictive,” Tubagus says.

The tobacco bill is an addendum that would support that law. But it would do little to fight the social forces such as peer pressure or lax parenting that allow many youngsters to get hooked in the first place.

And even when their parents, guardians or teachers have forbidden children from smoking, easy access to cigarettes remains a problem.

Ucok’s parents, for example, forbid him to smoke. But he can easily buy a single cigarette at the nearest warung for only Rp 800 (9 cents), and he gets Rp 8,000 every day as pocket money.

While Ucok hides his habit from his parents, Deny says he is welcome to smoke in his house. At first, his parents did not approve of his smoking. But after an initial period of being angry and trying to stop him, they ended up providing him with cigarettes.

“Sometimes they give me half, sometimes a full box of cigarettes,” he says.

While Deny’s parents only yelled at him the first time, Azhari says he received a different kind of treatment from his parents when they found out he had been smoking.

“My dad put five cigarettes in my mouth, tied my hands behind my back and told me to smoke [them] altogether without holding them,” Azhari says.

His saliva turned yellow from smoking so many cigarettes, and his father threatened to hit him if he found out that he was smoking again. Now, he hides his habit from his parents.

The same punishment applies at the school attended by Vinty, a 15-year-old girl, in Bukit Duri.

“They call students they catch smoking up in front of everyone during a ceremony, and tell them to smoke three cigarettes at the same time,” says Vinty, a nonsmoker.

Tubagus acknowledges that social conditions like peer pressure or family factors are not considered in the tobacco bill. Thus, he said a new bill on health promotion should be drafted to include “measures to solve the problem of young smokers from the point of view of their social environment.

“The promotion of health has to be integrated down to the smallest units in our society, from puskesmas [public health centers] and posyandu [local health care centers] to the family,” he said.

All these units, Tubagus said, should be able to help addicted smokers quit.

Tubagus also encourages doctors and local governments to start advising parents not to smoke around their children, and for parents to stop sending their children out to buy cigarettes for them.

Meanwhile, the tobacco bill to support the health law has yet to be passed.

“Some of the other ministries are yet to respond to the tobacco bill,” Tubagus says. “They need an interdesk meeting to discuss the draft.”

He says that the most important thing in fighting smoking is strong political will from the government.

“In many cases, tobacco has been known to be the entry point for other drugs,” he says. “They need to take this seriously.”

Although these teenagers indulge in tobacco use, they express a fear of harder drugs. That fear comes from a dark chapter in the neighborhood three years ago, when more than five people died from heroin overdoses.

“My dad died of drugs,” Ucok says, grimacing. He says it wasn’t an uncommon sight to see his father injecting putaw (low-grade heroin) into his forearms.

Ucok admits he has tried smoking marijuana and has taken anti-anxiety drugs, like Xanax.

“It’s easy to get ganja, I know some people in the neighborhood who sell it,” he says.

Azhari adds: “I won’t even smoke ganja.”