Chain smoking 2-year-old puffs through two packs a day

Two-year-old toddler Rapi Ananda Pamungkas has been chain-smoking for around two months.

He developed the habit by picking up discarded butts around his mother’s market stall in Sukabumi, Indonesia, which older boys would light for him, then started pestering passersby for cigarettes, who, finding his smoking endearing, would often oblige.

But the novelty has evolved into a chain-smoking addiction and his mother Maryati (35) admits to now buying him up to two packs of cigarettes a day to stop him from throwing tantrums.

“My child is used to smoking while drinking coffee and eating cake,” she says. “He has been smoking every day for around two months.

“If I don’t give him a cigarette my child goes beserk.

“If he doesn’t get cigarettes he can’t sleep. He will start rampaging and crying. It’s expensive because we have to buy them for him.

“He likes to do it all day. He can smoke 40 every day.”

At their wits end about their son’s habit, his parents are planning to get medical help to try and cure him of it.

Pamungkas is not the first Indonesian toddler to go viral for smoking.

In 2011 a video of another 2-year-old smoking went viral, and that toddler was also said to be addicted and on over a pack a day.

In Indonesia, cigarette advertising is legal and can be found all over the place. A 2013 Vice documentary focused on the fact that many children in Indonesia smoke from as young as six and that some residents of the country believe tobacco is actually a cure for cancer.

Activists blame the Indonesian authorities for this lack of awareness of the dangers of tobacco.

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