A Smoker's Rebuttal

It's happened again. The nation's smokers have been subject to more tax increases, causing already high prices to triple in some instances. A pound of tobacco that used to sell for $10.81 is now $36.95 and that should be enough to stir up the one-third of the people who enjoy smoking to taking action. It would be one thing if there were any evidence that smoking is harmful in any demonstrable way. There isn't. The Surgeon General's report that started this witch hunt is inconclusive on that score, based as it was on eleven equally inconclusive reports.

The first Surgeon General's report was published in 1964 and it was subsequently required that all cigarette packages carry a warning about the health hazards of smoking. That should have been enough, but then the lunatic fringe of the American population took over and escalated the hysteria to stratospheric heights. It proved to be another way for intrinsically unpleasant people to demonstrate their unpleasant natures. Well, I for one have had enough of this nonsense. Here are the facts about smoking for anyone not too stupid or bigoted to understand.

The United States leads the world in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes; we are the world's sickest people. Our food is laced with chemicals too numerous to mention here, some guesses number into the thousands; our water is chemically treated with fluoride, a waste product from the manufacture of fertilizer; the air we breathe is polluted by automobile exhaust, coal fired power plants, and sulpherous smoke from various manufacturing plants. In view of all this, how can any data with respect to cigarette smoking be separated out from these other causes? The short answer is; they can't. The anti-smoking campaign is rife with unproven, general statements on the dangers of smoking when a rational assessment of the facts tells a different story.

Reader's Digest is one of the print media's most incessant and hypocritical advocates in the effort to get people to stop smoking. A few years ago they printed an article purportedly by a young woman whose father had died a smoking-related death. On the title page of the article was a photo of the complaining party, a pretty blond who appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. This innocent-looking girl's story was designed to elicit sympathy and outrage against the filthy habit that took this girl's father out of her life. Boo hoo. But wait! Further along in the body of the story was the information that the girl's father had quit smoking eighteen years before his death! Smell something? I do. It's the rank odor hypocrisy; a publication that has probably contributed to more health problems by marketing prescription drugs to their readers than any other source - they've been doing this for decades, no doubt being generously compensated by Big Pharma - bleating their crippled agenda in the name of "public service" when the only ones they truly serve are themselves. The outrage over marketing prescription drugs to the general public only took form when pharmaceutical companies started sponsoring television commercials, a relatively recent development compared to Reader's Digest's long standing practice.

Another result of the hysteria over smoking and the misleading propaganda against it is that many people believe that cigarette smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer. The fact is that cigarette smoking causes none of these afflictions or any other, for that matter. That is not to say that smoking cannot aggravate an existing condition: it most certainly can, and people with respiratory or cardio-vascular problems should definitely not smoke. Alcoholics should not drink alcoholic beverages but I don't see anyone militating against drinking. Yet drunk drivers are a much greater threat to public health than smoking could ever be. Here there is no doubt about the causal relationship to highway deaths and serious injury. Why aren't heavier taxes imposed on alcohol to the extent that they have been for cigarette smoking. Don't medical costs of alcohol consumption for both drinkers and victims of drunk driving incidents rival those falsely alleged for smokers?

Then there's the matter of "second hand smoke". I had close friend who quit smoking some twenty-five years ago. I haven't seen the man in almost eight years, and that was when I visited him in East Texas after a lengthy hiatus: before that it had been ten years since our last personal contact though we did speak on the telephone occasionally. During one of the conversation he got on a rant about smoking and at one point he shouted, "You're killing me with your second hand smoke!" Over the telephone? At that time I hadn't seen the man in three years.

The man is two years younger than I but on my last visit I didn't recognize him when he came to pick me up at the bus terminal. He looked ninety! Over the past twenty years he has had brain surgery, diabetes, suffers from manic depression, and a few months ago, the last time I spoke to him on the telephone it was clear that his mind was going. I smoke, he hasn't for twenty-five years; I am in peak health, often taken for fifteen or twenty years younger, have never been physically stronger (I work out at a gym) and still ride a bicycle 15 or 20 miles an outing.

I spend a lot of time outdoors even during the many "air pollution" days when people with respiratory problems are encouraged to remain indoors and people are urged to car pool. That leads to another argument that the anti-smoking fanatics don't like to think about. It's all in the numbers.

The normal breathing rate is fourteen breaths a minute, in an hour that's 840 breaths and the air in the lungs is complete;y changed every seven breaths. I smoke an average of thirty cigarettes a day; they are filterless, regular size cigarettes that I make myself using organically grown, additive-free tobacco. I average about two cigarettes an hour, sometimes more and sometimes I don't smoke for three hours at a stretch. At the rate of two cigarettes an hour, ten puffs each, that's twenty out of 840 respirations an hour; one out of 42 breaths. The rest of that hour I am taking in 820 breaths of something else, on "air pollution" days, especially during an inversion, I am breathing bad air. If I happen to be on foot with heavy traffic all around (seldom) I am breathing heavy doses of carbon monoxide with every breath, not just 1 in 42 but every breath - all 840 for every hour I am out there.

There was a time, fifty or sixty years ago, when folks were healthier. The air was cleaner, tap water fit to drink, and food was purer. Men worked in factories, machine shops, and construction, and were able to earn enough money that wives could stay at home, take care of the home, and raise the children. Oh, there were problems alright; alcoholism, some drug use, and crime, but not to the degree we experience today. And people smoked cigarettes without the social stigma that prevails today. There were people who didn't smoke and some of these had unpleasant effects, but they didn't organize into militant factions reminiscent of Medieval mobs; smokers then as now, if asked not to smoke, didn't smoke if it would cause potential harm to anyone. But in the main people just didn't mind much. In 1950 the chances of contracting cancer were 1 in 27; today they are 1 in 4. We are a sicker society today; did cigarette smoking contribute to this in any way?

Yes. But it wasn't the cigarettes themselves. In the early 1950's cigarette companies started producing filtered cigarettes and as these became more widespread public health started its long, gradual decline. The first popular cigarette brand to come out with filters was Kent; the filters were so dense that it was hard to draw on them and to make matters worse, asbestos was the filtering medium. Even without asbestos filters are harmful to smokers. When a smoker inhales smoke through a filter some tiny bits of the filter material also enters the lungs. Filters are made of silicates and this fine residue settles on the lungs - and stays there: the body cannot metabolize it, just as coal miners' lungs couldn't, and over time both groups developed silicosis, also known as "coal miners disease" or ""black lung". Filters, not tobacco or nicotine, are the problem with cigarettes.

I'll close with another example of the ignorance of the FDA when it pronounced nicotine as an addictive substance. There is no such thing; there are addictive personalities but not substances. People satisfy their cravings with many substances, including food. I am a recovering alcoholic with over 28 years of freedom from alcohol. Drugs didn't appeal to me; I took amphetamines to get through college while working full time and carrying a full load at school. When I started hallucinating I stopped taking them. I didn't have a drinking problem; I had a living problem and drinking was my solution to life's problems - until the problems mounted to near fatal proportions. Today I wouldn't trade my worst day sober for my best day drinking; my life works, I have many good, true friends, I am physically fit and mentally acute - and I smoke non-filtered cigarettes. So do me a favor.

Leave me the hell alone! Deal with your own personality problems and stop playing the Blame Game. I don't need you to tell me how to live when you obviously don't know how to live yourself: if you did then you wouldn't find it necessary to meddle in other peoples' business.