Despite being a very unpleasant habit with many bad effects, smoking could prove to be hard to quit. New York Daily News reports that Skip Legault, the man whose heart-renching tale of multiple heart attacks, surgeries, strokes and an amputated right leg made him New York's anti-smoking poster boy is still a smoker.

"The more I watch my commercials, the sicker it makes me feel," Legault, 48, told the Daily News.

Skip Legault said that he goes through half a pack a day and in his interview with New York Daily News he insisted that his appearance in the ads is not hypocritical.  

"I don't feel like a hypocrite, because I'm not telling people what to do. I'm not telling them not to smoke. I'm just showing them what happens."

Legault, who said he started smoking when he was eight year old, has suffered two heart attacks in his late 20s, he had a stroke in 1993, which forced him to stop working, and at least seven blood clots that led doctors to amputate his lower leg due to gangrene.

Skip Legault was chosen from 100 volunteers to star in a New York Department of Health's anti-smoking campaign.

Despite being a serious health risk, 20.8 percent of American adults are smokers according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention latest report.

This percentage seems to have not changed since 2004. From 1997 to 2004, adult smoking rate declined more than 15 percent but data have not changed since then. Statistics made by CDC in 2006 showed that 45 million American adults were smoking. From all the current smokers, 80 percent seem to smoke every day while 44 percent tried to quit smoking for at least one day in the past year.

An anti-smoking report card released by the American Lung Association this week gave a majority of poor grades, Ds and Fs, to the federal government and states this year, asserting that too little is being spent on anti-smoking programs and that there are still states to increase their taxes on cigarettes and restrict smoking in public places.