Stop smoking, says Nitra - the town of prevention. (source: SITA)
UNTIL the end of November, Nitra can be called the town of prevention. During the next ten months, the city council together with the city police, civic associations, schools, cultural institutions, and individuals will concentrate on preventing all kinds of addictions and various types of pathological social phenomena like criminality and domestic violence, the TASR newswire wrote.
“Our main aim is to increase information and raise legal consciousness in people,” Miroslav Duchoň, who works on prevention for the Nitra police, told TASR. “We want citizens to realise that prevention is not just something for government institutions, but is everyone’s personal responsibility.
Policemen, officials, or other institutions cannot be everywhere. All of us can make some preventive efforts against addictions or criminality.”
Many preventive measures will be aimed mainly at children. The police intend to prevent children from coming into contact with addictive substance at a young age and to cut the base of such users.
“Based on our experience, first experiments with illegal substances can take place as early as age twelve, not to mention legal addictive substances,” Duchoň said. “Nowadays, children of eleven tend to smoke cigarettes regularly. Recently, an eighth-grader boasted to me that he had stopped smoking two years earlier.”
The fight against tobacco smoking is one of key parts of the project ‘Nitra – Town of Prevention’. Using the campaign slogan “On the first, we don’t smoke”, the goal is to turn the whole town into a non-smoking zone on the first day of every month. That one day without cigarettes might inspire people to rid themselves of their bad habit once and for all. During the campaign, the town police along with children will go out to areas around shopping centres and try to persuade smokers to put out their cigarettes and stop.
