Aquino is whipping boy of anti-smoking advocates

DUMAGUETE CITY, Philippines – President Benigno Aquino III has become a poster boy for anti-smoking advocates here.

The anti-smoking campaigners, mostly students from Negros Oriental State University and the Foundation University, paraded around the city on Wednesday to mark the end of World No Tobacco Month while holding tarpaulins that bore a photo of the President holding a cigarette.

The caption read, “What Pnoy [Aquino’s nickname]can’t do, we can do. Stop Smoking.”

Dr. Aparicio Mequi, dean of the Foundation University graduate school, said the message of the day was to tell everyone, without exception, even President Aquino, that smoking is not good for one’s health.

“If US President Obama, who was a smoker, quit smoking when he became President, we should likewise remind President Aquino to stop smoking and in the process protect his health as well as the vote of those people who put him into the highest level of leadership in our country,” Mequi said.

The President, who has been on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited advice against smoking, had told reporters that he would not yet quit smoking but he promised not to smoke in public.

Last month, the participants in the Tobacco Control Summit 2011 organized by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Alliance Philippines (FCAP) and the Philippine College of Chest Physicians were one in calling on Mr. Aquino to stop smoking and lead the Philippines to become a tobacco-free country.

Two months ago, the President said he would no longer debate about his smoking habit with groups seeking to make him an anti-smoking poster boy. Aquino, who could finish a pack a day, has vowed to stop “at the appropriate time.”

But he said that he was not ready to quit because of the pressures of the job even as he admitted that he was aware of the health risks of smoking.