Anti-smoking advocate Shalicia Harris is in the spotlight this week thanks to a youth anti-tobacco summit and a new public health ad campaign targeting smoking in movies.By ROB FAULKNER, HWDSB Staff
When Shalicia Harris walks past a smoking teen it can lead to an uncomfortable discussion. She’s had an uncle with lung cancer, a godfather with a voice box due to second-hand smoke. She’s one of HWDSB’s top anti-tobacco activists.
“I’ve called the tobacco officer when there is smoking on school property,” says Harris, 18, at Sir John A. Macdonald secondary. She’s spoken at conferences, travelled to various summits, and knows that combating Big Tobacco is difficult, but certainly not impossible.
“We have to work with our peers, motivate them to get on board and to see what the tobacco industry is doing,” says Harris, one of nine youth peer leaders at Hamilton Crew for Action Against Tobacco (HCAAT), a group supported by Hamilton Public Health Services.
Tomorrow (Nov. 25) is a big day for anti-tobacco activists like Harris, as 400 students from 26 local schools, educators, public health staff and volunteers unite for the Unfiltered Facts Youth Summit co-hosted by HCAAT and Party in the Right Spirit.
There, students will gain the skills, knowledge and tools to act against industries such as fast food, tobacco and alcohol. The hope is that they will return to their schools to become youth leaders, like Harris.
This is also the week that Harris is getting attention as the youth spokesperson for a new city ad campaign targeting smoking in movies. The Hamilton Public Health Services campaign Don’t be a Target! runs in 11 cinemas in central west Ontario until Dec. 18.
“Almost all films that contain smoking don't show any consequence to tobacco use, they simply try to show the use of tobacco industry products as cool, sexy and generally a normal part of life,” says Harris.
She hopes to “denormalize” the portrayal of smoking by, in part, explaining that more people smoke in movies than actually smoke in real life.
Don Curry, a city health promotion specialist, cites a 2008 US National Cancer Institute report concluding that the likelihood that a youth will smoke rises in direct relation to the amount of smoking they have viewed in movies.
“Knowing that most people who smoke start before the age of 20, we can’t ignore the effect that smoking in movies has on youth,” he said. Learn more about the campaign Don’t be a Target!
SJAM teacher Carol Town has been helping Harris and her colleagues for years as a teacher-advisor, and says she's encouraged by what they have achieved.
“We are not the only school doing this, but our committee has been very active over the past two years,” said Town, a co-op and English-as-a-Second-Language teacher.
SJAM’s anti-smoking club was originally called Breathing Space and is now part of the broader Health Action Team, which works on other health issues. The group has held events at which students see smoking’s impacts on a pig’s lung, experiments that show the by-products of cigarettes and Harris even visited Cathy Wever elementary to talk about what she calls "candy-flage" (the sale of candy resembling tobacco products).
“We’ve held an event called Kick Butts, where we share information and have put feet all over the school, with numbers written on them, and students were all wondering what the feet were about,” says Harris. “They were for the 33 people in Ontario who die each day… which is down from when HCAAT started and it was 123 people a day.
“We are making a difference.”
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