On the eve of the 20th anniversary Thursday of what was known for 19 years as the Lasso Tobacco Coalition (now Celebrating Healthy Communities), those in the trench warfare to get La Plata County residents off nicotine reflected on accomplishments.
Long past are the days when cigarette manufacturers used physicians, Santa Claus and Hollywood actors as shills to sell their products. But smoking, while not as widespread, continues to pick off victims, the anti-smoking leaders say.
Anti-smoking successes are measurable, said Jean Walter, who lost her mother to 40 years of smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and an aunt to secondhand smoke.
“We’ve had huge successes,” said Walter, an early anti-smoking campaigner. “We have organizations in the community that stand up and say, ‘We want a healthy lifestyle, which means we don’t want smoke in the air or toxic trash on our trails.’”
The decades-old stance of smokers to anti-smoking efforts – there’s nothing that can’t be resolved with courtesy and respect – didn’t work, Walter said. Community campaigns and legislation were necessary.
For sure, said Char Day, who coordinated Lasso campaigns for 17 years. Forty years ago, she said, smoking was commonly seen in restaurants, airplanes, offices and even hospital rooms, Day said. One person in four self-identified as a smoker, she said.
Based on 2008-10 data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the percentage of residents at least 18 years old who smoke are: La Plata County, 13.6 percent, Archuleta County, 23.4 percent and Montezuma County, 17.7 percent.
Durango voters in 1994, the year after the Lasso coalition was founded, rejected a proposed ordinance to ban smoking in public places. Three years later, a survey found that 60 percent of school-age children considered it easy or very easy to get cigarettes.
Anti-smoking forces kept pushing their message, which late in the decade resulted – after a sting operation – in putting cigarettes out of easy reach of underage users.
“We had kids as young as 10 years old buying cigarettes with no questions asked,” Day said.
Reacting, stores put cigarettes packs and “loosies,” individual cigarettes in a container, which sold for 25 cents each, behind the counter.
In 2006, after an earlier failure, the state legislators approved the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act requiring many work and public places to be smoke-free.
A year earlier, the Lasso coalition had asked Durango city councilors for a smoke-free ordinance, but were stiffed. Times changed, and last year, the city council banned smoking in parks and playgrounds, on the Animas River Trail and at bus stops.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment funded the early work of the coalition. But last year, with a broader scope of work, 82 individuals or organizations as partners and four federal and state grant-givers, the name was changed to Celebrating Healthy Communities.
The change in approach brought a shift from emphasis on strictly tobacco cessation to 40 broad categories of influences, external and internal, that shape young people into who they become, said Lauren Patterson, an evaluation consultant who has worked with Lasso and its successor, Celebrating Healthy Communities, since 2000.
Search Institute, which put together the 40 developmental assets for adolescents, found that youths who exhibit 21 or more of the assets, are more successful in life, Patterson said.
The total Healthy Communities budget is $325,000 annually, said Pat Senecal, director of health policy and systems at the San Juan Basin Health Department. Staff members Amber Beye, Cody Goss, Kyra Moon, Mip van Suchtelen and Shane Lucero work with partners and their programs.
“We work with 12 segments of the community, among them law enforcement, tribal members, schools, parents groups and faith-based groups,” Senecal said. “Members of the Boys & Girls Club, some who were with it for three years, found that if they stayed focused, they could change things in the community.”
daler@durangoherald.com
