Tipping the balance
Campaign seeks to stop smoking by highlighting dangers through former smokers’ stories.
Staff Writer srmoad@oklahoman.com
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking its Tips From Former Smokers Campaign to areas across the nation where smoking still has a sizable presence, and one of the most recent areas on its list was Oklahoma.
The national smoking rate is 15.5 percent. In Oklahoma, the smoking rate is 19.6 percent.
Christin Kirchenbauer, Tobacco Cessation Systems coordinator at the Oklahoma Health Department, said there are multiple factors that play into this data, including increased marketing in Oklahoma for tobacco, early exposure to smoking and a lack of health care in some places.
“They’ve got to replace those smokers that might die or might quit smoking, and so youth are a target for the tobacco industry,” Kirchenbauer said.
The Tips campaign’s goal is to stop smoking by highlighting the dangers and devastating effects of tobacco usage through the stories of former smokers. During the campaign’s visit to Oklahoma, Brian Hayden acted as a spokesperson for the campaign.
Hayden, a former Air Force sergeant, was 6 years old when he first started smoking cigarettes.
“I was very young,” Hayden said. “It was in the late ’50s, it was still advertised on TV, my parents smoked, everybody I knew smoked and so it just seemed like a fun thing to do.”
By the time the Hayden was 12 years old, he said he would smoke about a pack a day. His addiction only escalated until he had his first heart attack at the age of 35.
“Smoking has destroyed my body basically,” Hayden said. “Besides the heart attack, it put me into heart failure, and I continued to get worse and worse over the years until I was no longer able to work.”
Kirchenbauer said Oklahoma currently has the second-highest rate of death from heart disease
They’ve got to replace those smokers that might die or might quit smoking, and so youth are a target for the tobacco industry.” Christin Kirchenbauer, Tobacco Cessation Systems coordinator at the Oklahoma Health Department
in the nation, and smoking, like in Hayden’s case, is a contributor to that.
“There are a lot of factors that impact the health of Oklahomans and behaviors happen to be one of them, with smoking being one of those behaviors that impacts, not only prevalence or the percent of people who smoke, but also long-term health consequences,” Kirchenbauer said.
Hayden said his condition eventually came down to either getting a heart transplant or dying. The problem was that he couldn’t quit smoking.
“I lost a bid for a heart transplant because my doctor had found cigarettes were so addictive I couldn’t stop smoking to get my heart transplant,”
Hayden said. “Shortly after