Pou's sister speaks of own addiction

Helen Toomata sneaks outside the High Court at Auckland for a quick smoke.

"Oh God," she says, mortified, clutching the half-smoked cigarette behind her back.

The 56-year-old has buried two sisters to lung cancer.

She had ducked out for a smoke after the stress of giving evidence for the estate of one of those sisters, in a landmark case for damages against British American Tobacco NZ and W.D. & H.O. Wills NZ.

When her sister Janice Pou was stressed she could smoke between 50 and 60 cigarettes a day. She died from lung cancer in September 2002.

Now her children Brandon and Kasey, as executors of her estate, are finishing her legal battle, claiming $310,966 in damages from the tobacco companies.

Mrs Toomata has come up from Invercargill to give her evidence and watched on the television news her sister speak from the grave.

The video of Janice Pou's story, filmed a few weeks before she died, was played in court this week.

Propped up in a hospital bed, on morphine for pain, her sister forced words from her battered lungs.

"I just sat in the motel room last night and cried," says Mrs Toomata.

She has battled for years to give up smoking, trying nicotine patches, which gave her nightmares, and going cold turkey.

"I had to have a cigarette just to get over the nightmares."

Her sister tried at least 20 times to give up, each attempt a "spectacular failure".

Janice Pou's older sister, Margaret Karipa, a smoker, died from lung cancer on October 31, 1998.

"We'd never had cancer in our family, never talked about smoking and cancer, nothing. Margaret was a shock, then for it to happen again," Mrs Toomata says.

She talks about the stress of coming to Auckland and going to court.

"What do you do? You immediately reach for a smoke."

Her daughter, also named Janice, was the one who convinced her to come.

"She said, mum, you go up there, you give your evidence because you're probably going to die from a smoking- related disease as well."

Janice Pou knew she was going to die. A "boring" pain in her chest and lump on her neck was confirmed as terminal lung cancer in June 2001.

"That was the worst day, there was nothing to be done."

The woman she described as "a quiet lady" started smoking as a 17-year-old. She began with three a day but within months that jumped to 30. She told an addiction expert she could smoke up to 50 or 60 if she was stressed.

On her deathbed Janice Pou said if she had known smoking was addictive and could kill she would not have been seduced by the glamorous advertisements she saw as an awkward, chubby teenager with glasses.

Her cancer diagnosis and a television documentary which suggested that tobacco companies had resisted efforts to reduce the incidence of smoking in New Zealand changed her view.

Mrs Toomata says her sister's death has left a gaping hole in their family but the fight against the tobacco companies goes on because it was Janice's dying wish.

Mrs Toomata, dragging on her cigarette, says when Janice Pou knew she had lung cancer she tried to convince anyone she came across to give up smoking.

The addiction expert, Dr Doug Sellman, who interviewed her sister, has offered to help Mrs Toomata stop.

"I don't want my kids to go through what Janice's have.

"Even when she found out, she was such a strong, strong lady. She'd say, if you want to cry go away, don't come here'.

"She knew she wasn't going to make it but she was going to make a difference for somebody out there."

Health warnings appeared on cigarettes packets in New Zealand in 1974 but Mrs Toomata says they mean little.

She believes the cigarette companies should be endorsing the warnings which are still tagged "Government health warning".

Pictures of her sister fill the walls of her Invercargill home and she talks to her at her grave.

She is collecting newspaper clippings so younger family members know all about her sister.

She will not forget.

In her sister's last weeks she would take her home from hospital for long soaks in the bath.

It was 6pm on a September Saturday when her sister told her she was ready to die.

"She'd been in the bath and she said, right, I'm ready to go to hospital now'."

She died the following Tuesday at 10am. "She did open her eyes and I hope she was aware that we were there."