Smoking, For all the Right Reasons

IN 1964, when I was oh, what, nine years old, the gummit suddenly announced that smoking cigarettes was bad for you, and I, being a gullible little boy, took them at their word. I had, by that time, already inhaled enough second hand smoke from my parents to last a lifetime. In those days, nobody gave a damn about smoking around other people, people lit up, wherever they damned well chose, in their own homes, in other fplks' homes, in restaurants, in church, at funerals for lung cancer victims, in the faces of children and infants, every damned where. Complaining about it was forbidden, and considered quite rude. Major league baseball games were played in a fog. I think I can remember waving my hand in front of my face, and clearing just enough smoke to catch a glimpse of Mickey Mantle as he stood in the batter's box, hung over, but still looking for a pitch he could drive out for what would be his career home run number five hundred. He hit one off the top of the damned fence, ended up on second base, and boy, was my father pissed. All this, looking through a purple haze. My father eventually said that he was getting pretty damned sick and tired of people complaining about his smoke, as if anyone who wasn't down with lung cancer was some kind of damned pussy. This was because, as the 1970s played out, more and more people starting coming out of the closet as having secretly resented having smoke blown in their faces for years. Between 1920 and 1970, every adult in America was a chain smoker, including all the stars on screen, and no romantic scene was complete without Humphrey and Ingrid blowing smoke and kisses simultaneously in each other's made for the big screen visages. Everyone started to wonder why everybody was either coughing up green slime or dead,, while the big tobacco companies assured the nation that you'd walk a mile for a Camel, and that inhaling smoke was good for human health. Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should. Doesn't that sound just peachy, all rhymed up and all? God, what idiots. In that sense, the surgeon general spoiled a lot of fun, and worse came to worse in 1970, when cigarette advertising was banned from television, and everybody stopped walking a mile for a Camel (cigarette brand). Of course, by then, anyone who smoked was entirely incapable of walking more than a few feet, for anything, without an inhaler. So, never in my life have I inhaled smoke, with the exception of marijuana smoke, which I have inhaled often, starting at the tender age of twenty three, and continuing until....um...let's say...yesterday. I had asthma when I was two, and can remember the terror of living in an oxygen tent, like being underwater, my mom and grandmother smiling on the other side of the plastic box, as I lay wheezing, terrified. Doc said I'd outgrow it, and I did. Back in the day, doctors prescribed marijuana for asthma, which was, and still is a good idea. Now, at the ripe old age of sixty one, my lungs pump like a freight train, and I smoke like one, for all the right reasons. My state will vote whether to legalize in November, and guess which way my ballot will bong hit? Long live Colorado!.......PLEASE SHARE THIS ARTICLE WITH OTHERS, AND ENCOURAGE THEM TO CREATE!