By Scott Mowbray, Health.com

When I was 11 years old, I drew skulls and warnings on my mother’s cigarettes and then slipped the cigarettes back in the pack. If I was hoping to embarrass her, it worked: She offered them to guests at an afternoon party, and I heard the details. It wasn’t as hilarious as I had imagined, apparently. That was 1971.

Recently I asked a few friends and acquaintances if they had similar stories and received anecdotes dating all the way back to the start of the modern assault on tobacco.

One friend’s father, who was a D.C. lawyer representing a tobacco company in the mid-’60s, fired the client after being pestered by a uniquely positioned pressure group: his offspring.

Now 81, he emailed to say he recalls that “firing Lorillard as a client was written up…in an article in The Wall Street Journal, ‘Daddy, Why Do You Represent a Cigarette Company?’”

In the late ’60s, remembers writer Kate Meyers, who lived in Pittsburgh at the time, “My mom had a drawer in her bathroom where she kept her Virginia Slims 100s, and I would leave her notes saying, ‘Mommy, I don’t want you to die.’ She hasn’t touched a cig in about 40 years.”

In 1986, David Allan, now the husband of Health.com senior editor Kate Rope, culminated a “years-long campaign of lectures” by requesting information from the surgeon general’s office about the effects of secondhand smoke on children.

He received a C. Everett Koop-signed letter and some “book-size publications,” which he “cruelly” gave to his smoking parents for Christmas, asking only that they quit as a gift back to him (blackmail of Shakespearean cunning). Mom soon did, Dad eventually followed suit.

A few years ago, relates New Jersey writer Gail Belsky, her daughter and friends plastered the friends’ father, a smoker, with Post-it notes while he worked at his computer—the notes scrawled with antismoking messages.

These kids—what’s their real agenda?

Now, I don’t believe that kids’ motives are entirely pure here. There’s pleasure in turning the moral tables on parents, and public-health campaigns offer excellent air cover. Also, smoking is a safer target for kids than most: unambiguously “bad” without rendering its practitioners dangerous, the way alcohol can.

As to reports of campaign success, I suspect those successes often happen in families in which the parents have a predisposition to quit.

Still, never underestimate the wisdom of kids. Over the recent July 4 weekend, I asked a particularly wise 10-year-old girl what she thought about tobacco harassment. She mulled and then answered to the effect that it’s fair for kids to let their parents know how they feel, even by trickery, but a kid needs to know that smoking is addictive and a parent may not be able to quit. I suggested she ought to be surgeon general someday.

Meanwhile, last year the UK government gave a £15,000 grant to a community group that planned to arm kids with data so they could go home and put the screws to smoking parents. A pro-smoking spokesman called the idea “disgraceful moral blackmail.”

Perhaps. But I can’t help remembering an afternoon a few years ago, when I dropped my teenage daughter’s best friend off at a New York hospital to visit her mother, who had a brain tumor that had resulted from the spread of smoking-related lung cancer.

This woman, who had not been able to give up smoking even after her diagnosis, died while we were in the room, leaving the girl in the care of a father who, for reasons not worth detailing here, was not up to the task. I was grateful, at that moment, that my own mother had given up the habit decades before—whether or not my silly campaign had played a part.

Tools to help smokers quit

So, is it OK to harass the smokers we love? For kids, I think, absolutely. Adults—you tell me. And let’s discuss whether it actually works.

This week Health.com launches a new section of our site devoted to kicking the tobacco habit, with lots of quit-smoking tools, answers, drug information and even some reason to laugh: Check out the 1951 Goofy cartoon link in “97 Reasons to Quit Smoking”. If you have any stories or opinions about tobacco harassment, please share them below.

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