There's always a "butt"

[penfield]

"There are a lot of people for whom a cigarette is about the only vacation they have."
- Trey Parker (Co-creator of "South Park")

Despite our reservations, J. and I re-upped on our apartment with a short-term, three-month lease. It's going to cost us an extra $75 per month (over the rate for a 12-month lease) but it's going to take at least through the summer for us to get our act together and figure out where we're going to live.

As I was delivering our form to the administration office this morning, I noticed that there was a pack of Marlboros on the building manager's desk. I generally like to give strangers the benefit of my presumption as decent people, even when they are nominally affiliated with a fascist regime. But seeing the cigarettes there on her desk totally altered my perception of her.

In one moment, she was a crusty but plainly nonthreatening bureaucrat, somebody's kindly grandmother. In the next, she was either a common, weak-willed office drone or a corrupt, coldhearted villain. All because I discovered she was a smoker.

Personally and socially, I find smoking to be an abhorrent habit. I have never smoked, myself, so perhaps there is some small-mindedness or self-righteousness in that position. But I do have a close family member who has been a smoker for fifty years and another who's still learning, so I am not without some frustrated sympathy.

Intellectually, it would be easy to castigate the average smoking habit as indicative of frail moral fiber, but it can just as easily be rationalized as a chemical dependency or a psycho-physiological disease -- the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes both nicotine dependence and withdrawl among its maladies.

In this way smoking is publicly stigmatized in the same way as alcoholism and recreational drug use, except that smoking is more heavily scrutinized because it is black-and-white: while there is a fairly smooth continuum of alcohol and drug use, ranging from harmless to dangerous, you are either a smoker or you're not -- either a plume-spouting murderous harbinger of black cancer death or Joe Boy Scout. I feel for those people who are smokers but aren't actually assholes, even if my knee-jerk reaction is to assume they are assholes.

The world is becoming a better place for non-smokers, and I think that's a good thing. I recognize smoking's toll on public and environmental health. I applaud the work that JRR is doing with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the work of all the other activists who share the same goals.

But I also think that kicking smokers out of bars and restaurants is a little silly, considering that alcholics and the obese are invited to stay inside with the booze and the french fries for as long as they like. And I'd like to get to the point where I can love the sinner, hate the sin. But I'm not there yet.

Comments

[mearth.livejournal.com]

The only way my perception of smokers-as-assholes would alter would be if all smokers were required to smoke inside their own personal plastic bubbles, and none of their toxins could ever reach anyone's lungs but their own.

My parents have smoked as long as I've been alive, and it's often hard to love people who would choose to engage in an activity that could lead to the direct abandonment of their children via terminal illness (my dad now has emphysema), and who would rather smoke indoors than cultivate a safe environment for people, including me (you know, the one with asthma), to visit them. As a child I begged them to stop, and I've been convinced since I could talk that I was never more than 12 months away from being an orphan.

False comparison

[(Anonymous)]

There's no such thing as second-hand cholesterol.
-- JRR

Also ...
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/secondhandsmoke/factsheets/factsheet7.html

Re: False comparison

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

That's absolutely true. But my view is that the obesity epidemic is just as deleterious to the public health system as smoking. And heart disease (which, to be fair, incorporates diet, smoking and exercise) shows a strong correlation within families.

You don't have to lecture me on the harm of secondhand smoke -- I did a report on it in high school with the primary purpose of making my father feel guilty.

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your sharing this story, which is an extreme and regrettable example. In your parents' case, smoking is both a disease and a weakness. Very sad.

I suppose we all have to cope with our parents' character flaws. Yours' happen to antagonize you in a concrete and physical way. That's no less disappointing, but at least (a) you're aware of it and (b) you can take measures to protect yourself.

Re: False comparison

[(Anonymous)]

Hope it didn't come across as a lecture. Since you were in high school, your research has only been strengthened. (Surgeon General: "The debate is over. The science is clear. Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance but a serious health hazard that causes premature death and disease in children and nonsmoking adults.")

The question is whether we should ban smoking in public places, not whether there's other things -- banning transfats, increasing cigarette taxes, or banning the DH during interleague play -- would save more lives. These are not mutually exclusive choices.

Loving the sinner

[jatchwa.livejournal.com]

I should mention that at TFK, we also advocate STRONGLY for more money for smoking and tobacco cessation. It is cruel to raise cigarette taxes without doing something to help people quit. (We support raising tobacco taxes without the cessation funding because they strongly discourage kids from starting and also encourage adults to quit, but we prefer giving a good chunk of that revenue to helping people quit.)

I can't speak for any other anti-smoking advocates (some of whom are pretty callous toward the addicted) out there, but we're not anti-smoker here.