Pack-a-Day vs. The 750 Pound Man

June 13, 2009 Today’s New York Times and other online newspapers announced that the vote to regulate tobacco was nearly unanimous. Great! The additives in most cigarettes are reputedly there increase the chance that new smokers will become, and remain, addicted. Until the experts know what those additives are, they can’t eliminate them or assess the damage they do. Packaging aimed at seducing young people and turning them into the next generation of addicts is, arguably, unethical. As for new warning labels, we’ll all notice them initially because they’re different, then ignore them just as we ignore the existing ones.

I was born in Hollywood, California in 1941 and grew up in Southern and Central California. Almost everybody smoked: my family (with one or two exceptions) and their friends, my teachers, almost all my friends. Even my ballet teachers walked around the studio with a cigarette between their fingers. We were encouraged to smoke.

Smoking was glamorous. Movies from my childhood show the ‘beautiful people’ we adored, all smoking. On our old black-and-white TVs, our favorite stars smoked. Cigarette commercials featured doctors recommending their favorite brands. For a while in the 1950s, pipe smoking for women was popular. My older sister jumped on that bandwagon and had several pretty, jeweled, colored pipes. She also had long, sexy, glamorous cigarette holders.

My grandfather, who came to the U.S. in the late 1800s, smoked two-to-four packs a day for most of his life. He supported himself as a strong man in a circus until he  eventually started his own very successful furniture manufacturing company. He lived to be eighty-seven and did one-armed pushups in the old people’s home, just to show off for the ladies.

A major difference back then was cigarettes were made from additive-free tobacco. Period. For years, I’ve smoked the only American brand I’m aware of that is made from high-quality, additive-free tobacco. Will that save me? No, but feeding my nicotine addiction might have fewer negative side effects. Feeding my psychological addiction keeps me happy. After three years of unemployment, it is almost the only pleasure I have left.

I accept that I’m going to die eventually. My mother did, at eighty-three, after smoking most of her life. My sister did, after smoking all of her life. She checked out earlier than mom, just after her seventy-eighth birthday. I suspect that serious depression for twenty years was a contributing factor.