Chirac fires up crusade to stub out smoking

Fifteen years after kicking a two-packets-a-day habit to improve his presidential hopes, Jacques Chirac yesterday launched a "war on tobacco".

Among 70 measures costing €500m (£338m) to combat all forms of cancer, which kill about 150,000 French people a year, the president's crusade includes a ban on cigarette sales to under-16s, an intensified clampdown on smoking in public places and a proposed big price rise for tobacco.

Every year 30,000 French people die from cancer caused by smoking, and Mr Chirac believes he might have become one of them if he had not given up as part of an attempt to improve his image for the 1988 presidential campaign.

His addiction, betrayed by his nicotine-stained fingers, reinforced critics' view that he was too nervous for the top job. Fed up with mocking remarks from the then president, François Mitterrand, he fixed a date to stop after one last puff.

"In fact, I never smoked my last cigarette," he recalled. "I was going to smoke it after my breakfast and I had pulled one out of the packet when I asked myself: 'Why light up? This is absurd'. I'd no real reason for smoking. I crushed the cigarette and threw away the packet."

As a reformed smoker, Mr Chirac preached total abstinence before putting the cancer campaign on his list of personal priorities for the presidential election last year.

His own habit developed while he was doing his national service in Algeria, and he is particularly concerned that, despite more than 20 years of anti-tobacco restrictions, half of all 19-year-olds smoke.

As a beer drinker, with a taste for Mexican lager, the president also announced measures to discourage alcohol abuse, another major cause of cancer.

The war on cancer, which includes improved detection and research, was launched in the wake of the president's first priority, a road safety campaign which also had a personal resonance. Mr Chirac's career was nearly cut dead even before his first presidential campaign in 1981 when his car skidded on an icy road, though he escaped with a broken leg.