By Honor Blanco Cabie
Bernardo, who will celebrate his century mark in August, has never puffed a cigarette nor a hand-rolled native or Virginia tobacco – and he takes pride in his discipline.
Except for a dozen years he worked as a laborer in Hawaii’s Wahiawa sugar and pineapple plantations in the 1920s, he has spent his life in ironically a tobacco-growing region in the far north of the country.
Three of his seven sons, including his youngest who looks up to him in all departments, never had nicotine in their fingers nor in their gums although the latter are familiar with “basi,†the brewed Ilocano wine from sugar cane juice.
Bernardo, who used to supervise a small farmland devoted to patches of Virginia tobaccos that make his titled land and a great part of the Ilocos yellow green in summer, has seen relations and non-relatives succumb to lung cancer.
Only last month, as he stood flagpole-stiff watching the farm hands gather yellow green leaves from their tilled land for the nearby wood-stoked flue-curing barns, he heard from his transistor radio that Filipino smokers are on the ninth spot after those from India and China, among others.
According to the 2008 data disclosed by the Department of Health, which has repeatedly underscored the need to pass the Sin Tax Law, first proposed in 1990, to save millions of Filipino lives.
Passage of the bill is being pushed by healthy life style advocates who have joined forces with economists who see a double punch if the bill should be signed into law.
According to Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, the government is expected to have P33 billion more in its coffers with the approval by the House of Representatives of the sin tax bill – the lower house imposing higher taxes on so-called sin products like cigarettes and liquor.
Understandably, Ilocano farmers, who have depended much on tobacco as a major cash crop for more than 60 years, are up in arms against the passage of the proposed law.
“Through this groundbreaking move, we are much closer to reforming the current tax regime for tobacco and alcohol products, which has been in place for more than 15 years and has proven ineffective and outdated,†Abad said in a statement.
According to studies done by the Action for Economic Reforms, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes and alcohol will decrease consumption by 5.8 percent.
There are no figures how many from the Ilocos region, with a population of 8 million – the country’s top tobacco-growing area – smoke.
But the Department of Health, quoting data from the American Cancer Society and World Lung Foundation, says male Chinese smokers have taken the highest spot for world smokers, with 311,203,202, followed by India with 229,392,725.
Third is Russia, 32,827,525. The Philippines is on the 9th rung, with 17,634,512, according to the 2008 data.
Women Filipino smokers, meanwhile, have slid up from 26th spot in 2006 to 16th place in 2008, with 3,848,908. Topping the list are American female smokers at 23,671,860; China, 13,532,810; and India, 11,908,517.
In Bernardo’s nearly five scores on earth, many on the furrowed fields of his tobacco farm, he has not gone to a doctor for some medical check-up on tobacco-related diseases.
He takes pride in what he calls his simple life and healthy lifestyle – “no vices above the waist†is his ready quip with much younger men, after many of his colleagues, smokers and non-smokers, have gone ahead.
He thinks he has not suffered gravely from any of the long-term effects of smoking, and he waves his doctor’s certification he is in A-1 health.
Medical experts have listed harmful effects smoking can have throughout one’s life.
These are cancers, lung diseases, heart disease, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, osteoporosis and weakened bones, circulatory problems, ulcers, premature aging, damage to the fetus, low sperm count and impotence, miscarriage in the case of women, decreased lung function, bronchitis, infections, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
According to medical experts, smoking can also affect a person’s kidneys.
Renal cell carcinoma is the most common form of kidney cancer, with experts saying smokers are two times as likely as non-smokers to get this form of kidney cancer.
At the rate Bernardo walks in a crowd, many mistake him to be 40 years younger – “my discipline,†he would say unabashedly.
His audience of younger men endorse his line.
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