Credit: Pixabay
By Karin Brennan
Some of my earliest recollections are of my mother smoking. At home, in the car, in restaurants…everywhere. My brother and I hated it, because we were always waving away smoke and avoiding overflowing ashtrays. In those days, it seemed like everyone smoked.
And why not? Our parents grew up watching movies where all the glamorous stars smoked on screen, and all the “manly men” in commercials did too. My generation also remembers being stuck on international flights in the last row before the “smoking section” started. How ridiculous does that seem today? The concept that my rights as a non-smoker could be usurped by someone else who chooses to do something that undeniably creates a risk to MY life? Risk YOUR life if you must, but your rights end where mine begin.
That’s a very simplistic summary of the extensive research on second-hand smoke done over a period of years against the very powerful Tobacco Industry lobby at the time. At the end of the day, however, they lost, and away went the cigarette ads on TV, most smoking by stars in movies and, over time, by celebrities in public. Smoking became harmful to their image as well as their health. Traveling on planes, being in public places, staying in hotels, and eating in restaurants became much more pleasant for everyone except the minority of people who chose to continue to smoke.
The weight of negative social pressure, plus the highly taxed cost of cigarettes themselves, continued the trend. It’s rare today to be intruded upon by that harmful habit. So, is it “Déjà Vu all over again”? We have another powerful lobby, driven by profits over the lives of citizens. Again, it’s a minority of the population (at present, approximately one third of Americans actually own the large arsenal of guns in the US), and people are dying, at least in part due to the “product”, which is an ever-expanding national arsenal of weaponry.
Unlike with second hand smoke, the government has actually blocked the scientific study of the effects of gun violence on the population. Why? We can only surmise that the facts would fly in the face of the simple (but to this point, effective) assertion that owning guns is a Second Amendment right. Most of these individuals seem to ignore the fact that individual ownership of guns was not part of the original Second Amendment writing, but added via a Supreme Court decision in 2008.
Fast forward ten years to where we are today, leading the world in unnecessary, preventable and mostly tragic gun violence deaths. Add an increasingly bitter standoff between those who choose to take the risk of living in a country where virtually anyone can acquire a military grade weapon, and those who don’t want to live with that threat to THEIR constitutional right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
So, what happens next in the history of our still relatively young democracy? It seems likely that my generation doesn’t have the answers this time, or maybe just the collective will to settle this once and for all. As my generation changed the societal norms in relation to smoking, many hopes are now pinned to the “school shooting” generation to set the standards for the next generation to come after them.
The author is a U.S. Army Cold War veteran who served 3 years as a German linguist (Army Security Agency) behind the Wall in West Berlin. She has an MBA in Marketing, and is retired after a 27 year career at IBM as a Senior Marketing Manager. She’s married and lives in Carlsbad, CA.
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My parents didn’t smoke. Whenever a tense moment arose, instead of lighting up a cigarette, the way most people did in those days, they’d start screaming and cursing and lashing out. But most people did smoke, everywhere, and cancer was almost unheard of. Now that the anti-smokers have reduced smoking rates by up to 75%, the cancer rates have gone through the roof, to where almost everyone either has cancer, has had cancer, or knows someone who experienced cancer. There are even hospitals that specialize in childhood cancers, which today usually means cancers in small children who have never smoked, whose parents never smoked, and who were never in their short lives exposed to second-hand smoke.
There are so many carcinogens, substances known to the State of California to “cause” cancer, in our environment that it would be completely impossible to determine which carcinogen was at fault if a person who smoked two packs a day for 50 years died of lung cancer, but had also grown up in a “cancer alley,” had worked with plutonium, had sprayed or dumped the dioxin that is now in everyone’s bloodstream, had ingested more tritium than others who drank the same spring water, etc. Some carcinogens, much more toxic than tobacco leaves, like plutonium, can be invisible.
Is the reason that the United States is the only developed country where longevity is decreasing instead of increasing, due to the fact that we’ve forced so many people to stop smoking?
Between 2010 and 2016, London, England, brought their smoking rate down from about 25% to below 14%–the lowest in their history. During those same years the childhood cancer rates shot up 40%. Did London officials call off the anti-smoking campaigns? Did they apologize to the elderly smokers they forced to go outdoors in the rain and snow to smoke? Did they offer to pay people to start smoking again, as it was obviously the second-hand smoke that was protecting our precious children from cancer? Of course not. Authorities don’t like to admit that they were wrong.
I’ll be 78 years old this month. I’ve been smoking a pack a day for 62 years. I don’t have or want a gun. When I get angry I talk to people, or write emails, and smoke until I calm down. I don’t shoot anybody. I don’t want or need opiates either, but I can understand why people who had relied on smoking for most of their lives would seek them out, often getting them legally from the same doctor that convinced them to stop smoking, thus the opiate epidemic.
Do some research. Find out how toxic ordinary urban outdoor air is, and what carcinogens are in it. Then find out how much more toxic most indoor air is, and what carcinogens are present indoors. Then try to measure how much of each pollution is due to second-hand smoke. The component of every toxin in tobacco smoke is so small as to be negligible or too small to measure, yet you’re sure that it is the tobacco smoke that is dangerous to your health?
Sometimes it is difficult, for anyone of any age, to know when authorities are lying or telling the truth. Maybe they are telling the truth about both the dangers of tobacco and the necessity of more guns in schools. However if your personal experience and common sense tells you that they’re lying about one thing, you might not want to take everything else they say as truthful.
I’m sure you were annoyed by the smoke and smell of your parents’ cigarettes. But my smoking never threatened my life or yours. You were happy that something relatively harmless was banned, because it annoyed you, and you didn’t think about the things, like guns, that are much more likely to kill you. What if guns were removed from TV, movies, and books, the way that cigarettes are? What about a 2,500% tax increase on guns, because they kill more kids that cigarettes do, and they appeal to kids because they learn from the media that guns solve problems?
You’ve banished the real killer, the dirty stinky cigarettes, now learn to live with the consequences of people being unable to relax, being under a lot of stress, and being criticized constantly. If you’re just as afraid for your life if somebody reaches into their pocket for a cigarette, as you would be if they reached for a gun, your values are irrational.
Yes, if you were exposed to a hundred smokers in a small, sealed room, for 300 years, science has proved that it could lead to changes in your circulatory system that might, or might not, lead to cancer 40 or 50 years later. But after you’ve lived 300 years in that little room with all that smoke, would you really want to live another 50? If that person was reaching for a gun rather than a cigarette, you wouldn’t be discussing this.