• 6/22/2007
  • New York, NY
  • staff
  • NYDailyNews.com

The man with the artificial voice box is a powerful speaker to smokers

Scare-tactic television ads featuring a smoker who got throat cancer seem to be working, the health commissioner said Thursday.

The city’s annual community health survey found that 17.5 percent of adult New Yorkers smoked in 2006, down from 18.9 percent a year earlier. Nationwide, an estimated 21 percent of all U.S. adults smoke cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The drop marked the third time in four years that New York City’s smoking rates have fallen.

The overall trend began five years ago when the city began a campaign to tax, ban, and frighten smokers into quitting.

When the city first implemented its $1.50 per pack cigarette tax in 2002, about 21.6 percent of New Yorkers smoked. Mayor Michael Bloomberg followed up the hefty tax with a ban on smoking in most indoor public spaces in 2003.

Before those two changes, smoking rates had been stagnant for a decade.

The city’s progress appeared to stall somewhat in 2005, when the percentage of New Yorkers smoking didn’t change significantly from the prior year. Health officials responded with the $10 million anti-smoking advertising campaign.

Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden credited the ads Thursday with encouraging more people to quit, especially the television spots featuring cancer patient Ronaldo Martinez.

The series of ads, originally made by Massachusetts health officials, showed Martinez speaking with an artificial voice box and cleaning the hole in his throat that he now uses to breathe.

“We scoured the world for the best ad,” Frieden said.

Two of the largest drops in the smoking rate last year occurred among men and Hispanics, the city said.

Frieden said the state could push more people to quit by adding another 50 cents to the tax on cigarettes. He made a similar plea last year, but the legislature declined to act.

The city’s tobacco use data was based on a random telephone survey of 10,000 New Yorkers conducted late last summer by Baruch College. The survey questions related to the adult smoking rate and had a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.