•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

Sitting in a crowded cafe, 26-year -old “Astri” asks the waiter to bring her an ashtray before she puffs on her first cigarette of the evening. A group of college girls sitting at the next table recognize her as a celebrity and approach her on the pretext of borrowing her lighter. The girls light up their cigarettes too and start to smoke while chatting loudly about Astri.

“You don’t mind me smoking, do you?” asks the once-famous child star, still a singer today.

Astri first started smoking when she was still a high school sophomore, taking up the habit because most of her girlfriends smoked.

“When I was in college I became addicted to cigarettes,” she said. “I tried to quit but it was so hard. Everybody in my clique was a smoker.”

Astri did manage to quit smoking once, when she was pregnant with her son until the time he turned 2, but relapsed as soon as she decided to go back to work.

“In the entertainment business everybody smokes, from veteran actresses to newcomers,” Astri said. “During shooting breaks we all smoke.”

Though she realizes that as a celebrity mother, smoking sets a bad example for her son and fans, she says she cannot quit and refuses to pretend to be a quitter just to please everyone.

“I have thousands of followers on Twitter and they know that I smoke a lot; my son knows too, and he sometimes drops big hints … He says things like, ‘I think I’m going to die prematurely because my mom won’t stop smoking,’” Astri said.

Astri is just one of tens of millions of female smokers in Indonesia. As smoking has declined in many Western countries, it has risen in Indonesia. Around 63 percent of all men light up and one-third of the overall population smokes, an increase of 26 percent since 1995. Smoking-related illnesses kill at least 200,000 annually in a nation of 220 million.

Toxic Lies

Today, May 31, marks World Without Tobacco Day. The theme of this year’s celebration is “Gender and Tobacco with an Emphasis on Marketing to Women.” The WHO proposed the theme because women, along with children, have become the new target for the cigarette industry.

“The cigarette market for men is played out. Customer numbers are stable,” Fuad Baradja, head of the education unit at the Indonesian Smoking Control Foundation, told the Jakarta Globe. “The industry is now looking to develop this new market. Our TV stations are bombarding us with cigarette advertisements for women.

“We are being inundated by these advertisements. Cigarette companies are using very attractive images and beautiful, sexy women. They are trying to imply that smoking is cool, fashionable,” Fuad said.

He added that many companies were trying to lure women into smoking by selling low-nicotine cigarettes to create the image that the cigarettes were less toxic than the regular ones.

“Guess what? You’ve been lied to,” Fuad said. “Smoking low-nicotine cigarettes won’t minimize the health risks. It just makes you spend more money.”

The Global Youth Tobacco Survey conducted by the WHO from 2006 to 2009 found that 88.4 percent of Indonesian girls were exposed to cigarette ads on billboards and more than 87 percent of them were exposed to second-hand smoke in public places.

Changing Values

Prasenohadi, a pulmonologist from the University of Indonesia, said that a regular smoker was driven to consume a certain level of nicotine daily.

“When someone is addicted and needs two milligrams of nicotine a day, he or she will smoke twice as many low-nicotine cigarettes to compensate for his or her needs, which means he or she will spend more money on cigarettes,” Prasenohadi said.

“So don’t be fooled by the words mild, light or low.”

Sonny Harry Harmadi, chief of the Demographic Foundation, said that the cigarette industry had had women and children in its sights since the reform era began in 1998.

“Before the reform era, the stigma associated with females who smoked was so strong that a woman could be labeled as ‘wild’ if she smoked,” he said.

Now, Sonny said, Eastern values were no longer as binding in urban areas as in rural ones.

“That is why there are more female smokers in big cities; people in urban areas tend to be more permissive,” he said.

Fuad said smoking posed a greater threat to women than it did to men not only medically but also financially and psychologically because in a household, women usually took on the role of treasurer with the main task being to manage family spending. He said that since children tended to be closer to their mothers than fathers, they would tend to imitate their mothers’ actions.

Falling Sick

Uya, a mother of two in her mid-30s, said she was an active smoker from 1995 to 2001, but quit because her children started to grow up and questioned her a lot about her decision to smoke.

“They said that smoking caused a greater risk of cancer and they asked me whether I had the heart to put them in danger, day in and day out, as passive smokers,” she said. “That struck me and I decided to quit.”

Tricia Dewi Anggraini, an obstetrician, said that women faced greater health risks than men if they smoked. She said that most Indonesian women smoked during their “reproductive” years.

“There then arises the obvious infertility problem,” Tricia said. “They also tend to experience menstrual pain and irregular cycles. They also increase their risk of developing osteoporosis, early menopause, sexual dysfunction and even cervical cancer.”

Tricia said pregnant smokers also endangered their unborn children.

“Smoking will also affect a woman’s looks,” she said. “It damages the skin, the color of the eyes and nails.”