The Senior Editor sat in the room that used to be the restaurant in the downtown YMCA, with seven other people who had come to listen to Kyle Miller from ACHIEVE share the results of a Cathedral Square Neighborhood Survey. ACHIEVE is acronym for Action Communities for Health Innovation & EnVironmental ChangE, a group hoping to bring communities together to prevent chronic diseases and promote healthy lifestyles. The survey data, collected over four weeks in October and November tallied 511 responses, 93 percent of whom worked in the neighborhood. A survey of Onondaga County residents in June 2008 had found 83 percent support either restricting or completely eliminating cigarette smoking at public beaches, parks, playgrounds, public building entryways, hospitals and medical facilities, and outdoor music festivals and concerts.
The ACHIEVE survey focused mostly on second hand smoke outdoors (almost 90 percent said they were aware that smoke can travel into buildings from outdoor smokers), cigarette butts as litter, and the smoking policies of downtown businesses. The group’s goal, however, which Miller hoped to launch that evening, was the creation of the first tobacco free neighborhood in Syracuse. There was already a model for the effort in Ithaca, he said, where signage from a boundary system indicated a geographic area where smokers risked being fined for lighting up. A similar ban in a California neighborhood had designated smoking as a misdemeanor. In both areas, he noted, success was based on peer enforcement.
Healthy incentive
The Senior Editor flashed on the role the Y had played in his triumph in a personal tobacco war. His father and sister smoked heavily, as did most of the cool people in the movies he watched, but, pursuing an athletic lifestyle, he resisted, working out every day at the Y from seventh grade until graduation from high school. At college his best friend and basketball teammate was a heavy smoker—Pall Malls off-season, switching to filtered Marlboros when playing—but the Senior Editor still resisted, knowing he needed every possible edge to retain a tenuous seat at the end of his Division I bench. He lit up following the last game his senior year, a 16 point loss at Connecticut, and began a 30 year two pack a day addiction.
Aside from two years coaching Pioneer Homes, including championship runs in the Metro League and the Donny Fielder Tournament, the Senior Editor had abandoned the athletic lifestyle. But he longed for the return of the special world of running and bumping, and saw the local DrinkWise program as providing an excellent first-person story opportunity and a discipline to curb the five martini habit and the tobacco addiction which kept him out of shape. Advised not to wage both struggles at once, he first followed DrinkWise strategy and totally banished gin from his after work socialization, then used it to tally large visible scoreboards at home and work to register zeros for periods of time throughout the day gone smoke free.
Tobacco or food?
An inbuilt reward to the strategy established a box into which, each day smoke free, the money which would have otherwise purchased cigarettes was deposited. The strategy called for a goal for the savings, which for the Senior Editor became affording a Y membership, which he achieved and has maintained. And while he never retrieved the athletic lifestyle, and after three years of total sobriety gin returned as a moderate social factor, he has remained smoke free for over two decades, a blessing given that considering the current price of cigarettes, he would have to choose between smoking and eating.
Given his knowledge of the dangers of second hand smoke, the Senior Editor would love to remain living and working in a Cathedral Square Neighborhood choosing to become the first smoke free turf in the city. Call Kyle Miller at 474-6851 if you feel the same.
