Smokers: They enjoyed a good run

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Wednesday, September 5, 2007

To all appearances, everything that has been said in support of cigarette smoking is in danger of losing its first-place position in American society. Really, though, smokers shouldn't be too distraught about losing first place. Over the years, they've come up with some really good reasons why tobacco isn't killing them. They've had a good run.

"If I stopped smoking, I'd be really nervous, and everyone knows that being nervous all the time will kill you, maybe even sooner than the tobacco." This particular excuse has always been one of my favorites. It uses the fact that an enemy is an enemy is an enemy, and there's no sense letting go of a good one for a different one that may, for all we know, not be as good as our old familiar one.

"Just because I do or don't smoke doesn't mean I will or won't live to some randomly selected old age. Why, you could quit smoking and be killed in a car crash the next puff — I mean, minute." Heck, in defense of this one, just let me say that some of my best friends are still alive, and they smoke. For how long, well...

Here's another really good excuse: "The government wouldn't let me smoke if they knew it was bad for me." I think this particular rationalization is a bizarre form of liberal politics, the basis of which is as everyone knows that Uncle Sam will indeed take care of us if we let him. This reason to smoke does in fact have in its favor the fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays a hefty yearly subsidy to tobacco farmers down south in Dixie. We can't have our American smokers dying of Canadian tobacco, or Mexican, or who knows where. Now, can we?

"I quit once and got fat and the fat is a known killer I'd rather smoke myself into heaven they probably don't have any food there anyway." Or something.

"Quit? Why should I quit. I been smokin' since I was 14 and it ain't killed me yet, has it?" Well, no, but then you're only 29.

"God's truth, I wish I'd never took up smokin'. You wake up coughing, your throat's sore, you feel like hell, you light up the first one, it tastes like crap at first. Heck, since I enjoy this so much, I might's well keep on doing it."

Remember when the government co-ngratulated the to-bacco manufacturers for putting filters on their cigarettes back in the sixties? That just held back some of the nicotine so smokers would light up more of them. Profits soared.

The biggest pro-blem facing the 1963 U.S. Surgeon General's committee on smoking wasn't getting 15 experts together to testify about the harmful effects of smoking. It was finding a room in Washington that had adequate ventilation. Every one of the members of that committee smoked. Without a good exhaust fan, they wouldn't have been able to see one another across the table.

Anyway, all these excuses are now relegated to second place. The new controversy that has displaced dying of smoking is dying because of global warming, a growing discussion that is now ironically taking place in smoke-free bars and restaurants and meeting places across the country.

In a way, it places a more relaxed burden on smokers, who it turns out have after all been kind of right all along when they said that if they quit smoking, they'd die of something else probably. Probably. It's too soon to tell if they thought they'd expire of drowning when the polar ice caps melt, because I don't think most smokers really put these new bits of logic into their arguments quite yet. It is, however, pretty convenient, you have to admit. It opens up a whole new avenue of excuses:

"I knew there was something worse for you than smoking. Now I'm glad I didn't quit."

"You know? I'll quit smoking if you make cows quit passing gas and plugging up the atmosphere with it."

"I'll quit smoking when the water's so deep I won't be able to keep my matches dry."

For those die-hard roll-your-own folks, there'll be sticks and little bows to spin them to get fire. Any luck at all, it'll take'em so long to get the fire started that they'll give up smoking.

"No sense quitting; after all, when we're all afloat, there won't be anything else to do but smoke." And row. Don't forget rowing. And complaining.

Alan Linda writes from his New York Mills home.