[-JC]

My father farmed tobacco in the South with mules and left the farm to go to college because he didn't want to earn his living growing tobacco. Using it since his teens, chewing it and eventually smoking, convinced him that it was not a good thing-- highly addictive even before modern additives and generally nasty.

My father also died of what was called galloping consumption in my dad's youth-- in tobacco country-- lung cancer. He was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized, fast-growing tumor, that was already occluding blood vessels leading to his heart. His physicians assured him was inoperable due to the tangled mass of blood vessels and nerves involved. His prognosis was that he might live six months. He died in six weeks, 30 years after quitting smoking.

My earliest memories are of being held by my parents, both of whom smoked, and trying to avoid acrid "side stream smoke" curling up from cigarettes they held in their hands at the same time. Like an infant's skin, their noses and probably their lungs are more sensitive and irritable.

By about age eight, my parents took me to an allergist, thinking there was something seriously wrong with my upper respiratory system-- nose & sinuses-- and they were told it was simply the heavy smoking in the household and he sees it all the time. RAST tests were new in those days but my parents insisted on confirmation and, along with cat dander, ragweed and goldenrod pollen, which everyone knew from experience and common sense were a problem, the testing had a "strong" positive indication for tobacco smoke byproducts-- probably tar.

Being believers in the new god of the 50's-- science-- the both stopped smoking. Apparently my general health improved-- primarily weight gain, my respiratory problems went away instantly, and I can recall everything in our home did not smell bad when I came in from outside. That smell is a vivid memory from childhood that never ceases to repulse me when I go into a home or smell the clothing, skin, or breath of a smoker.

Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn whether the evidence is empirically-verifiable (etymologically-related to an archaic term for medical quackery-- "empiric treatment") or purely theoretical, subjective, or however a smoker might choose to dismiss it-- and I find smoker's thinking among the most tortured of anyone with whom I've ever wasted time believing I could debate. I rely on my own experience to develop my own survival strategy and prejudices, thank you very much. That works for me.

Assaults on perhaps the most tender interface between a human and their environment are cumulative. Ask anyone suffering from a syndrome of multiple lung ailments. Then read about PM-10 and PM-2.5, toxic mold, etc., and ask yourself if you want to add cigarette smoke to those unavoidable assaults.

30+ years ago, I worked one fall as a firefighter in the Northwest. Much of the time was spent putting new handles on hand tools, sharpening them, washing and drying hose, etc., you know, maintenance. But much was also spent inside doing project work like painting and in classes and meetings. Invariably most of these character smoked and I objected when it was right next to me. One jackass, the crew boss-- in a meeting, said-- and I'll never forget it, "You signed-on fight fire, man, and smoke bothers you?" Two of the only young men I worked with in those days are dead from lung cancer.

You want to search for something scientific, here's something I read years ago and my observations bear-out: The incubation period for lung cancer is very long and I recall seeing the figure 30 years somewhere. Yes, cardiovascular changes associated with smoking reverse rather quickly when one stops smoking but lung changes apparently do not.

Much advertising is simply slightly adulterated bullshit. The current foolishness about peripheral artery disease (PAD). Treadmill walking quickly doubles the capillaries in the calf-- something that can be uncomfortably demonstrated in the physiology lab by amateurs. Those suffering from PAD ("The risk is real," the Jew doctor on the TV commercial intones as he looks you in the eye) is because sufferers sit on their ass too much. Period. Drugs treat the symptoms.

Much of public television is propaganda. Much of it isn't. Much as I despise the politics perpetuated by EXXON MOBILE, I like Masterpiece Theater. I enjoy Nature and Nova. Of mainstream television news, which I watch, as did William Pierce, Ph.D. (Quantum mechanics, by the way, are the first to admit that most all of what they believe about how the world works is what they call theory, as in the "general theory of relativity"). However, those who cannot think critically, which is most everyone anymore, have no business with a television in their environment.

And I'll add one more comment guaranteed to piss-off smokers and sympathizers. In my experience, which is considerable, there is something wrong with people who smoke on a fundamental level that interferes with how they value themselves and therefore other people and that makes them hard to get-along-with. I can honestly say that, as an adult, I never had a satisfactory relationship-- business or personal-- with anyone who smokes. Thankfully I can spot many of them by the finely wrinkled skin: A former secretary of a board on which I serve recently approached me offering her assistance and I declined immediately simply because her face had the cracked, crazed look for someone who had sat at a desk chain smoking much of her career and within a week it turned-out I was right to avoid her.

Some behaviors belie a syndrome of other problems. Queers are more apt to put piss in the coffee urn at work, for example. I figure there is something fundamentally wrong with someone who puts "his" pecker alternately in black buttered goat custard dispensers and their "lover's" mouths-- plural. When I find out that someone is "gay," I avoid them in all situations like the plague that they are publicly and privately worldwide. I would gladly genocidally eradicate tobacco from the face of the earth, too.

Ask young, attractive women, with whom you'd like to mate-- those that aren't addicted to the many addictive alkaloids in tobacco burned at high temperature-- how they feel about smoker's breath, a yellow-brown mustache and yellow teeth, stinking skin, clothes, and home furnishings-- yours and hers. I think you'll end up discovering that you are handicapping yourself unnecessarily toward simply having a better life with an intelligent woman and having more intelligent offspring if you eschew smoking, chewing, snuff, what have you, Marlboro man propaganda notwithstanding because its brought to you by the same people who brought you Brokeback Mountain men.