The other day there was a commercial for Dean Martin's television show collection and in every single shot practically, he was holding a cigarette, laughing as if he didn't have a care in the world, having the time of his life, the picture of good health and youth. He's gone now though. So is Paul Newman, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, John Wayne, Johnny Carson and all the other heavy smokers who were the picture of health at one time.
Sometimes I wonder if the ingredients in the cigarettes, all those poisons, are more plentiful now than they were in the 50s and 60s when these people smoked, and when our parents and grandparents smoked. Here's what is in the cigarette now though:
Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. These include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT.
Can anyone explain to me how exactly it is that our government won't stop tobacco companies from poisoning us? I mean, they rush in and slam the brakes on other products such as lead paint, or asbestos products, etc. And yet this is okay to sell in every single convenience store in the world, or in every grocery store. It's legal and it's okay to consume these ingredients several times a day. Can anyone explain this to me?
I miss you Paul and John and Lucy and Johhny and Dean and Jackie and so very recently, you too Patrick. I wish that when the government realized the ingredients that were manufactured, packaged, sold to the general public as safe (except for a warning on the package that basically said .... "this could kill you, but we're still going to market it anyhow and make it amazingly addictive too") ... well, I just wish somebody somewhere would have stopped it somehow. I think that could have been done, I don't know. I wish it had been done before I was born so I never would have smoked, but ...
so far nobody has done it. We are still allowing a product that kills us to be marketed and stocked in the local stores for our own children. We haven't stopped it either. It's insane and yet allowed.