That’s not a big deal really, and it wasn’t until she decided to add to her purchase. A carton of cigarettes, two lighters and nearly $100 later her business was done.

The child on her hip requested a lollipop but was denied, as mummy said she didn’t have enough money. I was that stunned I nearly bought the kid the lollipop.

While I realise that smoking is a very hard habit to break, what I want to know is: why do people still start smoking in the first place?

We’ve known it will kill you for longer than I’ve been alive. What drives people to spend so much money on it, forgoing household essentials to keep up the habit?

More or less just rolling up money and lighting the end of it. I just don’t get it. I’m sure there are smokers reading this right now thinking; well that’s easy for you to say, you don’t smoke you won’t get why we smoke.

And fair enough, but hey if a columnist can’t be opinionated then what’s the point?

But I have been a smoker, I smoked during my late teens to my early 20s, and to this day I cannot for the life of me work out why I started in the first place. Was I trying to be cool? Who knows, I wasn’t even that good at it.

It’s an addiction, and it can take you by surprise with its power to control you. As a police officer I saw people in the grip of addiction, do terrible things to themselves and those who love them.

While I know smoking cannot really be matched to a drug addiction, it is an addiction to a substance.

Remembering the mum and small child at the supermarket, I worried about the effect living with a smoking parent would have on her. So I researched the effects of second-hand smoke on children, I discovered something that truly startled me.

Did you know that a child has a greater lung surface area than an adult and they breathe faster than adults, making them more susceptible to the effects of second hand smoke?

Those children will be more likely to develop asthma, pneumonia, croup, ear infections and bronchitis.

Changes in children’s behaviour have been linked to being exposed to second hand smoke. I wonder how that mother may feel down the track, should (god forbid) her child develop an illness due to second hand smoke.

Authorities are so serious about the effects of smoking on kids, that in 2009 they made it against the law to smoke in your car with any under the age of 16 as a passenger. However, the threat of major illness we now know is simply not enough to put people off smoking.

So what about this: A packet of cigarettes costs around $12, and say you smoke a pack a day this means in one week you’ve spent nearly $100, making it 400 bucks a month.

That’s a car repayment (on a very nice car) or half the monthly mortgage payment, in a year you’ve spent five grand on smoking, say it with me five thousand dollars.

Five thousand dollars that could have better spent, on something far more enjoyable, you could have a damn good holiday for that. So if the threat of emphysema, stroke or cancer doesn’t scare you off, maybe the hit to your hip pocket will?

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