Jeff Short is a high school baseball coach now, but he used to be just another teenage ball player, dreaming of the Major Leagues. So he knows what his players are thinking when they watch their favorite players.
"When you look at a Major League dugout, and you see these players with tobacco," Short said, "First thing you think of - oh that's cool. Oh, I can do that."
A coalition of public health groups, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Smoke Free Texas, are trying to stop this cycle. They've started a petition on Change.org, trying to get Major League Baseball to ban smokeless tobacco, just like they did a few years ago in the minor leagues.
"We're asking them to include a ban on smokeless tobacco on the field and in the dugouts in the new collective bargaining agreement this year," Danny McGoldrick, spokesman for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids told reporters this week.
Why ban smokeless tobacco? Well, cigarettes might have a worse reputation, but chewing tobacco is anything but harmless. It causes cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus and pancreas, as well as gum and mouth diseases, and can lead to heart attacks. And although cigarette use is down among teens, smokeless tobacco use among teens is on the rise, up by 36 percent since 2003, according to the CDC.
Players and coaches say young people want to be like their idols, and when they see their idols chewing, they start chewing too. Joe Garagiola, Sr., a former catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and now a sportscaster, used to use smokeless tobacco. He stopped when his daughter asked him if it would kill him.
"Like many other players I thought being a Major League player meant you had to chew," said Garagiola. He agrees that the substance should be banned.
"Get together guys, ban tobacco and anyone who uses it is penalized. Get it out of our game," he's said.
MLB commissioner Allan H. "Bud" Selig has come out supporting the ban, saying he'd like eliminating chewing tobacco to be part of this year's contract negotiations in the league. But Players Association head Michael Weiner says knows the issue has come up, he says he's not sure how it will be received.
"I'm not going to make any predictions about where we're going to go with it, but I do expect it to be an issue," Weiner said.
source: news.change.org
Your campaign Tobacco-Free Kids is very nice. I think we can save children from big disease like cancer and lungs failure.
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