Don’t despair if you’ve failed numerous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes
is the poor man’s crack, which retails for a gram. That’s not the bargain it may seem because the high from -worth of crack lasts five minutes. If it weren’t for its dangerous effects on users, crack would be a perfect product whose customers keep coming back for more — every five minutes.
Heroin remains the most dangerous drug in the popular imagination but not in the world of empirical research because street drugs are legally prohibited, whereas at a pack, cigarettes are merely prohibitively expensive.
No one goes to jail for lighting up a Marlboro. They end up in cancer wards where approximately half of smokers die of tobacco-related diseases, losing on average 14 years of life, while each cigarette smoked deducts 11 minutes, according to a 2004 report in the journal BMJ, published by the British Medical Association.
If the anti-tobacco crowd had any political clout and if any other product shortened the lives of its customers so fast, cigarette possession and manufacture would be felony offenses. The victims of three-pack-a-day habits who weren’t deterred by prison-time or health problems might be deterred by the increased cost due to criminalization and the additional risks street dealers would be exposed to.
As anyone (like me, a three-pack-a-day junkie until I quit 30 years ago) who has experienced the six-month hell of nicotine withdrawal will confirm, in a world where tobacco is recognized and criminalized as the poisonous blight it is, cigarette smokers like any other drug addicts would rob liquor stores, embezzle company funds, snatch purses from little old ladies, sell their children to pay for a carton of smokes, and commit all the other crimes associated with the underclass’ illicit drug use and the compulsion to steal in order to finance the smoker’s fix.
If you want proof, not speculation, regarding the addictive power of nicotine, consider the selfish, life-endangering behavior of hospitalized smokers whose friends smuggle cigarettes into the medical facility. I know because I was one of the lunatics and a good/bad friend of a terminal smoker who guilt-tripped me into sneaking cigarettes into his hospital room.
He was dying, so I figured it was too late to give my friend the same 20-year lecture about the ugly death from lung cancer suffered by my father, whom I nursed during the two years he coughed up more phlegm than Mt. Vesuvius belches smoke. As I transported unfiltered Camels into the hospital, I felt as though I were granting a dying man’s request, which is impossible to refuse.
During my smuggling operation, a nurse told me that what I considered an act of charity for a dead man was actually irresponsible lunacy that could have filled the entire hospital ward with corpses. The nurse explained that the ubiquitous oxygen tanks were more combustible than old rags soaked with gasoline. (I’ve always wondered who soaks cloths in gas and for what purpose.)
A single spark from a cigarette could set off a chain reaction of exploding oxygen tanks, killing everyone in the ward, possibly in the entire building if it caught on fire. After the nurse’s informative lecture ended, so did my uninformed but well-intentioned smuggling of legal contraband.
The macro equivalent of sneaking a cancer-causing drug into a cancer ward comes from more shameful statistics: Every year in the U.S., 15 percent or 30,000 lung cancer victims who never smoked die from second-hand smoke generated by “first-hand” smokers with whom non-smokers share close living quarters. More lung cancer casualtiess who never smoked die than leukemia, ovarian cancer and AIDS patients combined, according to a 2007 study, “Lung Cancer in never-smokers: A different disease,” in the monthly oncology journal, Nature Reviews Cancer. Lung cancer patients dying of the effects of second-hand smoke are innocent victims of their alleged loved ones who value their fix over the lives of their unloved ones.
Among smokers and non-smokers alike, the prognosis for lung cancer patients is grim, with a survival rate of only 14 percent five years after diagnosis. Ninety percent of lung cancer deaths are directly attributable to long-term exposure to tobacco smoke, first- or second-hand. It’s not hype or hysteria to call tobacco poison and accuse its producers of poisoning the American people. They are 21st century reincarnations of the Renaissance Borgias.
CODA
How do we end the scourge that Washington and state tobacco lobbyists perpetuate?
I can think of two possible solutions that will never happen because of interference by Big Tobacco and the legislators it buys. For a large enough campaign contribution, the most ardent advocates of, say, affordable health insurance will become whores for any industry, no matter how repugnant.
I watched with disgust and disbelief Michael Moore’s