How can a celebrity help a cause?

Being the Winston man, when I talk to the public, especially kids, they look at me as somebody who knows what he is talking about. So they pay attention. It is not like their parents telling them not to smoke. They can relate to me since I have experienced it. When they watch movies and see James Bond in a tuxedo telling them something, it is more effective. When a star tells them it is not cool to smoke and that 50 per cent of smokers die from smoking-related illnesses, theywill listen. Especially when I tell them I started to smoke at the age of nine.

Really, why did you begin so early?

In my case, I started smoking because my father died when I was nine. All my elder brothers smoked and there was no one to stop me from doing the same. I was made to believe that if you gotta be a man, light up a cigarette. There were advertising campaigns and movie stars endorsing cigarettes. Therefore, being macho went together with smoking.

Who were the known faces endorsing cigarettes, when you were a kid?There was John Wayne smoking and endorsing cigarettes. Then, there were Lucille Ball, James Dean, Arthur Godfrey. We also saw doctors endorsing cigarettes saying that it was healthy to smoke. There was a whole lot of cinema stars who were smoking in the movies and also doing television commercials. Legends like Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey, all smoked on the screen.

When did you get addicted to smoking, and when did yourealise it was affecting your body?

It did not take long to get addicted. I was fully addicted by the time I was 14 years old. I joined the army when I was 17, where they had an hourly smoking break. If you didn't have cigarettes, they were thrown at you. By the time I left the army, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. In 1988, When I was 47, I realised I had lung cancer. I never really stopped. Just before my operation, I was told to quit smoking for 10 days so that the lungs cleared. But while in the waiting room, the night before my operation, I could not resist it. My doctor was both angry and aghast, but I did not have control over myself.

Why is it so difficult to leave the pack behind?

Good question. It is very difficult to leave the pack behind because nicotine is the most addictive drug known to mankind. According to proven research, it takes four seconds for a drag on a cigarette to go to your brain. NO drug works that fast. Even inhalers don't work that fast. You get thenicotine buzz right away. Once you are hooked on to it and used to a certain level of nicotine in your blood, your body revolts when it goes down. You can't sleep, get dizzy, your head feels light, you get crampsin your stomach. It is terrible.

Also, unlike other recreational drugs you start smoking as soon as you wake up. Then it becomes a part of your lifestyle. So you smoke when you wake up, you smoke when you receive a phone call, you smoke when you go to bed or after sex. Even when you drink alcohol, you need a cigarette. It is both physically and physiologically addictive.

What is the role of advertising in promoting smoking?

The tobacco companies make it as appealing as they can. They spend $6 billion a year enticing the youth of the world to smoke. They make you believe that if you smoke, you are going to be sexy, attractive, successful, accepted by your peers, rocking, macho, cool and sassy. They use these campaigns to exploit the desire among the youth to be accepted and loved. Theyproject this image in every media -- from day-time movies to night-time movies, magazines and even cartoon characters like Joe Camel, who try to target children who are six-years-old! And then Marlboro pays half a million dollars to Stallone to smoke their brand, on screen.

Are these companies aware of the social costs?

Oh, they are cold-hearted killers. I've sat in front of them and told them that. They lie about everything. You won't have anything truthful coming from tobacco companies. They have known, since 1940, based on their own documentation that nicotine is addictive and that it gives you lung cancer. They have conspired to keep this information from the public. Documentation from the Minnessota papers shows that. They even met in Plaza Hotel in New York in 1953 to decide on how to continue to keep it from the public. Here they set up the Tobacco Institute, which is a propaganda machine to negate every fact the health organisations put out. Therefore, for an average guy in the 1960s, thecigarette did not have any labelling talking about health. Even in 1964, when the first labelling began, it only said `Hazardous for Health'. How callous can the governments be?

Is government regulation the only solution?

Yes, we need the governments of the world to regulate nicotine as the deadly drug it is. No government in the world regulates tobacco. They don't even tell you what is inside it. They should tell you that a pack contains 42 carcinogens, including rat poison.

I want to see that on the packs. I want to see it listed on the packet that tobacco is addictive and that it can cause lung cancer and that 50 per cent of those who smoke die from it. They could also regulate the amount of nicotine that goes into tobacco. Instead of that, you have farming of tobacco in South America, in your country, growing more poison.