P-Noy whipping boy for anti-smoking advocates

DUMAGUETE CITY — President Aquino 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 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 in calling on Mr. Aquino to stop smoking and lead the Philippines to become a tobacco-free country. /INQUIRER