Malcolm Gorrill
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Feb 01/02) - Alfred Moses says he is "discouraged" by reaction to events he organized within Inuvik during National Non-Smoking Week.

Loretta Sementha looks over the anti-tobacco display that Alfred Moses, community health representative for Inuvik Public Health, placed in several locations during National Non-Smoking Week. - Malcolm Gorrill/NNSL photo

Moses, community health representative for Inuvik Public Health, held a series of activities last week. He put on presentations and a scavenger hunt at Sir Alexander Mackenzie school and the Inuvik Centennial Library. During the week he also held tobacco exchanges.

"As compared to last year, there wasn't as much support from the community," Moses said.

"The tobacco exchange, that didn't go so well. We maybe got a half a pack of cigarettes, as compared to over six packs last year." Two restaurants went smoke-free on Weedless Wednesday, Jan. 23. They were The Roost and To-Go's

Health issues

In various locations Moses showed a display featuring graphic photos of people suffering ill effects from smoking. He said this tied in with the theme, "Educate tobacco hate."

"I gave the hardest facts on smoking to try to get people to quit," Moses explained.

"The pictures had a lot of people, showed a lot with, like, lung cancer or lip cancer, people who were dying from the cancer itself, things like strokes, heart attacks," he said.

"This year I kind of focused more around second-hand smoke and the youth as well. So when somebody came up to met at one of my tobacco exchanges where I had an information booth set up, I was always interested in finding out if they were a parent and if they smoked around their kids," Moses said.

"If they did then I gave them some interesting facts about what could happen to their kid if they continued to smoke around them, stuff like middle ear infections, early onset of asthma."

Moses said young people were shocked by the display, and that parents were generally receptive to what he was saying, but that other adults weren't.

"What I got out of a lot of people was they knew (already) what it did to you. A lot of people were ignorant and said they were going to die anyways, and a lot of people said they didn't care," Moses said.

"It's kind of sad because smoking is probably the worst health problem we have in Canada, if not the world." A single cigarette contains more than 4,000 chemicals, of which more than 50 cause cancer.

"Second-hand smoke is just as bad as smoking itself," Moses said. He explained that when a person smokes, some of the chemicals get dispersed into the air when they hit the filter of the cigarette. Therefore the smoker does not inhale these, but anyone nearby does.