Smoking toddler seen puffing on a cigarette in video causes public outrage

Tara Brady
Daily Mail, UK
Tue, 04 Feb 2014 07:14 UTC

Footage has emerged which shows a toddler appearing to smoke a real cigarette. The young girl, aged about two or three, puts the cigarette into her mouth and inhales several times before breathing out dark smoke. The clip, which has been uploaded to LiveLeak, is believed to have been taken in Finland and has caused public outrage.

© Unknown

One person wrote: 'Must originate from her sick parents or siblings. Persons under 18 are not allowed to either sell or purchase tobacco in Finland.

'The country has among the toughest smoking laws in the world.'

Some others have also suggested she could be smoking an e-cigarette.

A two-year-old from Sumatra in Indonesia shocked the world after he was photographed chain-smoking cigarettes.

Ardi Rizal, who is now five, was photographed puffing on a cigarette while riding his tricycle.

The outcry led to the Indonesian government launching a campaign to tackle the problem of children smoking and organising special rehabilitation treatment to help Ardi quit.

Ardi was taken for play therapy sessions in the capital Jakarta for two weeks to take his mind off his 40-a-day habit and learn to be a normal toddler for the first time.

During his rehabilitation treatment, Ardi saw psychiatrists who encouraged his mother to keep him busy with playing and taught her about the dangers of smoking.

One of them - Dr Kak Seto - still sees Ardi and his family at regular intervals to ensure he is not falling back into old habits.

However, Mrs Rizal is now worried about her son's weight, as he developed food cravings while quitting smoking, and now has a big appetite.

© Ardiles Rante/Barcroft Media

The youngster was discovered in a poor village in Sumatra, Indonesia, puffing on a cigarette while riding his tricycle

Last week the Labour party proposed an amendment to the Children and Families Bill which would ban drivers in private vehicles from smoking when a child is present.

Health Minister Mark Drakeford also believes electronic cigarettes are 're-normalising' smoking.

He told BBC Wales' Sunday Politics: 'I am far more worried that the e-cigarette movement is re-normalising smoking that it's re-glamorising smoking.

'It contains nicotine and nicotine is highly addictive. We don't want e-cigarettes to become a gateway to real cigarettes.'

Comment: The 'outrage' is understandable given that people today have been led to believe that smoking is the root of all evil, but according to one A.J. Bell, writing in about 1700:

"For personal disinfections nothing enjoyed such favour as tobacco; the belief in it was widespread, and even children were made to light up a reaf in pipes. Thomas Hearnes remembers one Tom Rogers telling him that when he was a scholar at Eton in the year that the great plague raged, all the boys smoked in school by order, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking. It was long afterwards a tradition that none who kept a tobacconist shop in London had the plague."

And from another source:

When plague was abroad even children were compelled to smoke. At the time of the dreadful visitation of 1665 all the boys at Eton were obliged to smoke in school every morning. One of these juvenile smokers, a certain Tom Rogers, years afterwards declared to Hearne, the Oxford antiquary, that he never was whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking. Times have changed at Eton since this anti-tobacconist martyr received his whipping. It is sometimes stated that at this time smoking was generally practised in schools, and that at a stated hour each morning lessons were laid aside, and masters and scholars alike produced their pipes and proceeded to smoke tobacco. But I know of no authority for this wider statement; it seems to have grown out of Hearne's record of the practice at Eton.