My feet slide on the loose gravel, as my butt lands on the slightly damp blacktop. I unwrap the plastic case and toss the trash into a close bush. My friend, Maria, to the right pulls out a Bic lighter from her hoody pocket and lights the cigarette dangling from my mouth. I take a long drag and begin to tell my six-lesbians-in-a-hot-tub story. Ten minutes later, I light another of my Parliament Lights. Eighty minutes later, the pack of 20 was just loose flakes of tobacco.
The truth is even when I was smoking like a sailor, I was a horrible smoker. It affected me in all the unsexy ways. My four years of smoking was filled with chronic allergies and major congestion, I thought the heaving and wheezing was a satisfactory sacrifice of my health. Add coughing and spitting up yellow crap every 10 minutes and getting sick every month.
I admit smoking was fun, relaxing, and just right with a couple of Anchor Steams. God, there was something to say sitting on a splintery back patio picnic table with a Camel between my two fingers, telling a story with eccentric hand motions. However, the day my mother, who has never smoked one cigarette in her life, a real goodie too shoes, told me she had breast cancer, I realized that I would never want to tell my own children that I could have prevented my own cancer. I haven’t smoked in five months.
“Tobacco is the second major cause of preventable death in the world. Tobacco kills more than AIDS, legal drugs, illegal drugs, road accidents, murder, and suicide combined,” say the American Lung Association. “It is currently responsible for approximately 5 million deaths each year. If current smoking patterns continue, it will cause some 10 million deaths each year by 2030.”
Before I stopped, I ranted like all the other pack-a-days. I cursed those who made me walk 20 feet away from the over hang when it was raining, became pissed when courtesy coughs drifted into ear-shot, and couldn’t understand why the hell they wanted to control what I was doing to my own body.
The guy to the right of me is probably going to rant and rave just like I had, waving his lit tip up in the air, kicking and screaming his own right to freedom to inhale the lovely smoke of centuries of “I don’t give a damn.”
The truth is pal, that your hardcore attitude is the same one that is continuing this American tradition of self-destruction. We never let the fat girl get away with another piece of cake without layers of judgment, why is the skinny white boy allowed to buy five dollars worth of years of health problems? Because it is his choice, his body, and his health insurance (maybe), right? I am not against all forms of population control, when it is between consenting adults.
Unfortunately, Crasshole’s choice isn’t only inhaled by him, seeping through his blood stream and piling up as black layers in his lungs.
This smoker’s choice places 40 tons of nicotine, 355 tons of soot and ash, 1,900 tons of carbon monoxide in California’s air each year. I know there are other contributing factors—cars exhaust, factory exhaust, and all the political lies drifting up like a black plume. There is no denying that multiple factors dirty the air, but it can’t be an argument for something that contributes to 400 additional lung cancer deaths a year in nonsmokers, 3,600 deadly heart attacks and 31,000 asthma attacks in children, according to California’s Clean Air Project.
But here is the real kicker for me. For the first time, the California Air Resource Board in 2006 concluded that women exposed to secondhand smoke have up to a 68 percent greater risk of breast cancer, what am I going to say to my kids now?
And for you Walter babes, Philip Morris has been targeting the GLBT community in magazines and bars since 92’. Fifty-nine percent of GLBT youth use tobacco, while only 35 percent of non-GLBT youth do. So don’t try to say that your rights are being taken away now. The Man had you pinned down and gagged way before you started.
