Quitting Smoking

SEEMS LIKE WE HAVE HAD a lot of fifty year anniversaries lately. Today's fiftieth anniversary is of the announcement by the U.S. Surgeon General that smoking tobacco is hazardous to your health. That changed everything. Prior to this announcement, in nineteen sixty four, cigarettes had been seriously glamorized in American culture, and everybody smoked, and the death rate from lung cancer was astronomical. How long could society not notice that? Cigarettes were marketed in the nineteen twenties as health supplements, incredibly. I remember how cigarette commercials on television used to make smoking cigarettes seem like the coolest, sexiest activity available. I honestly think that if television advertising for cigarettes hadn't been banned in 1970, nobody would smoke cigarettes today. Who would dare advertise cigarettes today? People know how fake, dishonest, and deadly it is. Still, some people still smoke cigarettes, incredibly. They would be, like, infinitely better off smoking marijuana; nobody has ever been killed by it. My dad started smoking when he was fourteen, and died from lung cancer at sixty eight. Not bad, considering. When he realized it was killing him, he didn't care, he just kept on smoking. My mother started smoking cigarettes at eighteen, and quit when she was seventy eight. She live to be ninety three. Not bad either, all things considered. The war on smoking which began fifty years ago coincided with the growth of the whole health industry; health food, vegetarianism, vitamins, etc. Here's to your health.