'Tar Wars' pitch prompts fifth-graders to think about smoking

It’s nearing lunchtime Friday at Allen Elementary School, and 20 fifth-graders in Janet Miller’s class are thinking of reasons to start smoking.

Or more specifically, reasons other people smoke: Because they think it’s cool, or they’re stressed out, or they feel it sharpens their focus and gives them energy, or their friends smoke, or they have nothing better to do.

One reason the fifth-graders didn’t mention: nicotine addiction. Starting to smoke isn’t easy — you cough a lot, accidentally burn your eyebrows and nose hairs and sometimes set your clothes on fire. Stopping smoking is darn near impossible.

Dr. George Shannon is asking fifth-graders why anyone would start smoking so they’ll think about that before someone offers them a cigarette. Students in fourth and fifth grade are starting to make individual choices. They have to think for themselves.

Shannon gives each student a straw, Breathe through it, he tells them, and hold your nose. Now get up and run in place. After years of smoking, a person’s lungs turn from fleshy to leathery, he says. Inflating them over those years is like going from blowing up a balloon to a tire. Emphysema, or scarring of the lungs, makes it increasingly difficult to draw in oxygen, 21 percent or about a fifth of the air.

That’s why those with serious respiratory ailments wind up hauling oxygen tanks with them.

Breathing through a straw is like emphysema, Shannon tells me: You get worn out by the least exertion. If at that stage you don’t quit smoking, you’ll soon need an oxygen tank.

Besides the gradual decline in lung function that comes from smoking, there’s the cost. Shannon asks the class: What’s a pack of cigarettes cost?

Hmm ... stumps me.

“Five dollars!” a student answers, and he’s right.

So I am not smarter than a fifth-grader.

Do the math, Shannon tells the kids: A $5 pack a day is how much a week?

Twenty-five dollars, a student says.

Nope, $35 — five times seven, not five times five, Shannon says: “You took the weekend off. We smoke on the weekend, too.” With 52 weeks to a year, that’s $1,820 annually.

But worth it to look so glamorous, you would think from cigarette ads, minus the obligatory surgeon general’s warning. In the ads, some hot babes and hunks are having a smoke. They’re never overweight with wrinkled skin, brown teeth, yellow fingernails and shirt burns.

Shannon passes out cigarette ads for the kids to analyze. Then he passes out colored markers and poster paper. Having students create anti-smoking posters is the last piece of the “Tar Wars” program Shannon, with the Foundation of the Georgia Academy of Family Physicians, is presenting. Tar Wars has a national poster contest.