I Quit

Old habits die hard. My oldest habit is - was – smoking cigarettes. I, like so very many of my generation, started smoking at a very young age. The year was 1968; I was thirteen. I picked up this nasty habit from my parents, not that they didn’t try to stop me. They picked it up from the world at large, or at least the advertising world at large.

Back then cigarettes were everywhere. There was no such thing as “non-smoking”. These days there’s “non-smoking” and there’s “outside”, which on an airplane is tough. It’s hard to light up at 550 miles per hour. Used to be you could smoke inside, outside and in between. It was considered rude to ask someone to put out that cigarette. Smoking was a God given right and only a communist atheist pig would dare ask such a thing. I once spent a week in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and there were signs all over that, I swear, said “Thank you for smoking”.

Cute cigarette smoking penguins invited you to “Come In, It’s Kool Inside!” Magazine cartoons depicted expectant fathers pacing and chain smoking, right there in the hospital maternity ward waiting room, and when the baby came the proud papa handed out cigars. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble and Andy Griffith and Barney Fife extolled the pleasures of Winston cigarettes, which tasted “good like a cigarette should”. This raised the ire of any number of English teachers, not because of the health risks of tobacco, but because of the atrocious grammar. Virginia Slims told women “You’ve come a long way, baby!”, all the way to the cancer ward

In the movies the hardboiled detective always had a cigarette dangling off his lip, and the vamp always needed a light. The cowboy hero could roll a cigarette one handed, a skill many a pot smoker would come to envy. Of course Bogie died of lung cancer and so did the Marlboro man.

Real doctors gave heartfelt testimonials for Camel cigarettes, citing their healthful digestive benefits. Tarryton smokers would “rather fight than switch”, Pall Malls were smoked “where particular people congregate”, Chesterfields had “not a cough in a carload”.

In World War II millions marched off to war carrying free cigarettes. Prisoners of war received cigarettes in their Red Cross packages. Offering a smoke to a captured enemy soldier was an act of kindness. Prisoners facing the firing squad were entitled to “a last cigarette”. “Three on a match” was bad luck for obvious reasons.

Edward R. Murrow and Mike Wallace smoked during interviews. Between interviews they flogged the product. Murrow smoked unfiltered Camels and died of lung cancer. Wallace smoked Philip Morris and is apparently immortal.

Joe DiMaggio, Frank Gifford and Arnold Palmer, among many others, appeared in cigarette ads. The most valuable baseball card in the world is the 1909-1911 T206 Honus Wagner card issued by the American Tobacco Company, fetching prices as high as I would have to be to pay them. Wagner withdrew permission to the company to produce the card either because he didn’t want children buying cigarettes to get it or because he wanted more money.

Tobacco once defined our culture.

Tobacco was America’s first currency. Without the revenues brought in by this drug, there might well be no United States of America and without tobacco there likely would have been far fewer Africans abducted for the slave trade. The plant that the red man saw as sacred, the white man saw as profitable; enslaving the black man made it more profitable. In the deadliest double standard in history, we spend billions of dollars attempting to prevent cocaine, heroin and marijuana from being imported into this country on the one hand and make billions exporting American cigarettes. We make gods of our addictions and worship them slavishly. We define ourselves by them. We live for them and all too often we die for them.

Believe it or not, quitting was very easy for me. One reason was that I was truly ready. The other reason it was easy is a drug called Chantix. It’s available only by prescription and it’s expensive. It costs about $150 for a month’s supply, which is less than I was spending on cigarettes every month. I know this sounds like one of those “ask your doctor” ads on TV, but, hey…ask your doctor if Chantix is right for you. Now, if the manufacturers of Chantix want to compensate me, fine.

I don’t know that I would have quit smoking for my own good. A friend of mine, a certain Dr. Fazuil (not his real name), once said something I think is true. He said he believed that smokers have a death wish; they’re just not in any big hurry. They want to kill themselves, but they want to do it over a 20 or 30 year period so they can savor it. I think smokers do tend to be more matter-of-fact about death and disease than non-smokers.

Fear of death didn’t make me want to quit. Nor did shortness of breath, hacking up stuff too ugly to make horror movies about, stinky breath, yellow stains on my fingers, yellow teeth, gum disease or social ostracism. Not even a heart attack made me quit. I quit for one reason and one reason only.

I love my wife.