Eight-year-old Indonesian boy smokes two packs of cigarettes a day

Source: The Telegraph

An eight-year-old Indonesian boy smokes two packets of cigarettes a day in a country where there is no minimum age for buying or smoking cigarettes.

The country's Child Protection Commission said that the boy highlights the government's failure to regulate the tobacco industry.

After food, cigarettes account for the second-largest household expenditure in the Southeast Asian country of 240 million people, nearly half of whom still live on less than two dollars a day.

But there is no minimum age for buying or smoking cigarettes.

"Ilham started smoking when he was four years old... his smoking habit grew day by day and now he can finish smoking two packs of cigarettes a day," the boy's father, a motorcycle taxi driver called Umar, said, according to the Antara news agency.

The boy, who lives in a village in West Java provincial district of Sukabumi, would flare up in a rage and "smash glass windows or anything" if he was not given cigarettes, he added.

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