Smokers

Tobacco's Big Lie

A few days ago I was thinking about my mother, gone now 26 years. And about the times we lived in. About how she died. Which led me to something all of us alive pre-1980 remember well, but that rarely enters current discourse in our society. Tobacco use. Smoking in particular, and even more pointed--Cigarettes. 

If someone were to ask any of us about something that was entirely normal in a 1972 living room that you will never see now, “ASHTRAYS” is always the most popular answer. 

We grew up with a father with a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a mother with a Salem sticking out of her mouth over the stew pot. All of the furniture in my house had little burn marks on the edges. 

The women on my distaff side tended to last into their 90s. As a teenager in the mid-1930s my mother did what almost everyone else did in that era. She started smoking.

By the early 1960s she was in her 40s. That was when tobacco’s big lie was revealed. Cigarettes cause serious lung and heart issues. She KNEW because she was an intellectual of sorts, and well-read. She simply didn’t care enough to quit. She came right out and said it--tobacco was her closest companion. She did switch from Salems to American Spirits. She died 5 months shy of 80, and her death certificate named tobacco as the cause of death. Emphysema and angina.

It is no longer popular to talk about the tobacco die-off but if you are Boomer or X you almost certainly know a casualty. Maybe it’s you. It was late in the day when the danger of SECOND HAND SMOKE got out of the white papers and into public consciousness. 

In the 1980s, the indoor ashtrays went away. The habit declined but did not go away. It just went underground. The tobacco dealers, who are part of the SOUTHERN industries, paid nothing for their sins. They were banned from advertising on TELEVISION, but anywhere else was fine. And they had to put a warning label on the product. These are the heirs of the old slave power.

420,000 deaths a year, and all of them terrible ways to die. I posted a question on facebook asking if people smoke and how they feel about it. The thread broke my heart.

But there is a strange twist to this story. The social aspect. It has been at least 30 years, more like 40, since indoor and open smoking became either outlawed or shamed into hiding.

But don’t jump to the conclusion that the habit lost its hold. At every event, retreat center, hang out, and watering hole there is, somewhere nearby, a “designated smoking area”. But, what does that matter?

It matters because it is those benches, or that log, or those folding chairs that the smokers sit upon. And if YOU want to know what is happening in the space or event, or want to get in with the in-crowd, or have reason to court the movers and shakers, this is where you will find them.

The etiquette is relaxed in the smokers area. You must at least nod at anyone else there. But you may also talk to anyone in the circle in a way that would be presumptuous anywhere else.

And you never know who you might meet. Actually smoking a cigarette or device of some kind is the preferred stance. But you can bypass that. It is outside after all. Think of a reason to be there and see what happens.

I don’t think the social benefit alone is enough to explain an enduring cult built around the use of a poison. It figures into something I am at a loss to understand. Why do we tolerate mass poisoning?