Marlene picked up smoking in high school – decades later, she developed macular degeneration and relies on eye injections every month.
The 56-year-old is joining a handful of peers as the newest faces in the CDC’s Tips From Former Smokers campaign – a series of chilling videos that reveal the repercussions these people are now facing after a lifetime of smoking.
“This will probably go on for the rest of my life,” Marlene says about her monthly eye injections she needs to maintain her vision. She’s had more than 100 shots in each eye already.
“If I’d had a crystal ball many years ago, I would never have put that first cigarette in my mouth,” she warned.
READ MORE: How health officials helped 120,000 people quit smoking
In another instance, Julia talks about two decades of smoking. She developed colon cancer at age 49 that required surgery and chemotherapy. She uses a colostomy bag taped to a hole in her abdomen to collect waste now.
“That’s where they reroute your intestines so you have bowel movements that go into a bag through a hole in your stomach,” Julia explains.
“My tip is: Get over being squeamish. You’re going to be emptying your bag six times a day,” she warns.
These stories are purposely graphic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hoping that their cautionary tales that could convince smokers to quit. This is the second batch of ads since the campaign began in 2012. U.S. officials say the first wave of ads pushed millions of smokers to try to butt out.
“These former smokers are helping save tens of thousands of lives by sharing their powerful stories of how smoking has affected them,” Dr. Tom Friedan, the CDC’s director, said in a statement.
“These new real-life ads will help smokers quit, adding years to their lives and life to their years,” he said.
READ MORE: Smokers who quit before 40 save a decade of their lives: study
When the ads were on air, about 80 per cent more people called the U.S. quitline for help. Since 2012, the campaign led to more than 500,000 additional calls, the agency says.
In 2013, Terrie Hall, one of the key faces of the 2012 ads, died of cancer and was hailed as a hero for speaking so candidly about her disease.
READ MORE: Woman featured in graphic anti-smoking ads dies of cancer, hailed as hero
In telling her story, she put on a wig, inserted her fake teeth and covered a hole in her throat with a scarf. Her voice was deep and gravelly.
“I was so addicted that I smoked morning, noon and night. I smoked when the telephone rang and when I was finished eating. I smoked for whatever reason there was to light up a cigarette,” Hall said.
“I even smoked the day of my surgery right up to [the] front door of the hospital.” Her surgeon told her that day, as he wheeled her in, that that would be the last time she would light up a cigarette.
Hall’s first ad received more than 2.8 million views on YouTube.
Dr. Tim McAfee told Global News that year that the campaign was the largest and most expensive campaign the U.S. government has funded so far with a $54 million price tag.
In coming up with the idea, the researchers polled about 10,000 smokers and asked them what would help them most. The answer was resounding: “the theme the smokers said was most helpful to them was real stories of suffering that smoking causes as opposed to death,” McAfee told Global News.
So that’s what McAfee pursued. It was a controversial project. About 20 former smokers shared their real life stories about how smoking changed their health.
They spoke candidly; their video autobiographies documented their downward spiral into poor health. McAfee said he almost expected cheerful tidbits on how former smokers kicked their habits. It wasn’t exactly how it turned out.
Some of the lowest rates of smoking are in the physician population.
READ MORE: Should smoking bans extend to public parks and beaches? Debate sparks controversy in Canada
“One of the reasons is that we see people suffering day in and day out, really seeing the harms of what smoking does to people, so it’s much harder to think about doing it when you’re confronting it,” McAfee said.
He suggests the campaign did the same for smokers. It turned statistics into something tangible to current smokers.
Watch the latest group of ads here.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_Chai
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