1team1dream wrote:Crack is an addiction as well, and the body believes it needs it. I feel if you have the decision to either start doing or not doing crack you have the same decision to start smoking or not to start smoking. Millions of people survive every day without smoking, (and some don't because of second hand smoke)
That's kind of a snarky reply. I mean by equating cigarette smoking with illegal drugs. When the government outlaws tobacco, then you can realistically conflate the two. Nicotine
is a legal narcotic, albeit not a controlled substance. Everyone knows that it's a narcotic
now, along with all the information of studies that have been disseminated ad-nauseum publicly over and over again. I was hardly aware of that when I started - nor was my brain in any state to make a fully informed rational decision. As a study at UCLA pointed out last year, the human brain isn't fully developed until somewhere around 20. I was 12 when I started smoking - I hung out with a crowd of tough, hardcore surfers around the H.B. pier, and that was just what everyone did to fit in. That in no way is meant as an excuse, but I can say that I was easilly persuaded and underinformed in 1971, and became addicted long before I had the mental capacity to understand addiction and physiological effects. Besides, how many young tweens or teens think about health issues in any depth - puh-leeze!
The thing that I am fed up with is the holier-than-thou responses scattered through this thread, and the holier-than-thou attitude heaped upon smokers by a lot of people in So Cal. Yeah, smoking is a choice. So is getting up in the morning, or eating chocolate. Enough already.
You can pat yourselves on the back and feel proud that you never caved in to peer pressure or that you were "smarter" than everyone who did start. Keep your smug moral superior attitude to yourself already. If someone's ciggy bothers you, there's no need to be rude or nasty about it - two minutes of exposure is not going to give you lung cancer that very minute. It takes years of excessive exposure, but some people act as if they're in the presence of Typhoid Mary or a leper.
In case you never read Miss Manners (I don't know if the Register still prints her column or not), the person who feels put upon and bluntly demands that someone in their vicinity stop what they're doing in the moment - or go do it somewhere else (provided it isn't illegal) is considered the rude one. And I'm fully aware of the irony that I am being quite rude to point this out. To paraphrase Miss Manners, being in the "right" is no excuse for being rude to someone else. So I should probably apologize to those of you whose metaphorical faces I would love to be yelling in right now, but I'm not going to, because y'all refuse to apolgize for feeling so above reproach and superior to those who still haven't kicked the habit.
If someone wants to smoke a hookah, smoke a pipe, cigar or cigarette in their own house - it's none of my business, nor is it yours Mr/Miss/Mrs Busybody. If someone is not in a designated smoking area in public, and you're not a working cast member/employee - find someone who is who can handle the situation in a friendlier manner with more authority (i.e. - the authorization of employment). And again, the CM's who deal with the smoking question are more welcome when they are non-judgemental and nice about the problem at hand.
And again - for those of you holier than thou non-smokers who feel you have a right to clean air - when are you going to start walking/riding bikes/horses everywhere? Because motor vehicles are much bigger pollutants than cigarettes, and not too many people complain about smog issues in a moralizing-you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself tone of voice. And driving an internal combustion engine polluting car is a choice too, isn't it? I was working for G.M. when the electric car program was around. It was based in another department of the facility I was working in - and I didn't exactly see people beating down the doors of the dealerships to get their hands on electric cars back then, nor do I hear a great groundswell of demands from all you militant anti-smoking types because you're worried about air quality. If you're going to talk the talk, you should really walk the walk.