Finally kicking the smoking habit is certainly no, fool's errand

[manofsteele]

Finally kicking the smoking habit is certainly no, fool's errand
Sharon - Softmtnrain Smoke Away Support Sharon also married to Joe4320 Celebrate 3 Years Smoke Free - May 15 , 2008

On Sunday, July 1, 2007, the comprehensive smoking ban in Louisville, KY will go into effect. Yea!!! Many arguments have been made regarding smokers' rights, but the bottomline is this....defending smoking is definitely a fool's errand. Time to see smoking for what it is....a filthy, nasty, life-robbing addiction. Read what one local newspaper writer has to say about the addiction.


"So, some local bar and restaurant owners recently filed suit in Jefferson Circuit Court to delay Metro Louisville's smoking ban, which is due to take effect July 1.

Their latest argument is that banning smokes in their establishments, but not at Churchill Downs, gives the racetrack an unfair business advantage.

Well, Churchill Downs shouldn't have been exempted.

But my question is what exactly is being defended here, other than added encouragement for an addiction that kills more than 400,000 Americans a year and that adds billions of dollars to the cost of health care in poor states like Kentucky?

Smoking isn't some esoteric issue for me.

I smoked for 25 years, and by the time I quit in 1990, I had a three-pack-a-day habit. The cigarette companies loved me. After I quit, I promised myself that I wouldn't go around nagging people who hadn't kicked the habit.

But it was a fool's promise.

Really, if I saw a car bearing down on someone as they crossed the street, I'd scream for them to get out of the way. I don't know how to swim, but I can't imagine not at least throwing a lifeline to someone who was drowning.

There isn't a single good argument to be made in defense of smoking.

It's not cute.

It stinks.

Its burn ups your clothes.

It makes people sick.

It kills.

Ask me. I've been orphaned by cigarettes.

After years of chain-smoking unfiltered red Pall Malls, my mother and father suffered terribly and ultimately died of smoking-related cancers.

My dad, who developed cancer of the lung, mouth and throat, was dead at 59. My mom did stop smoking the day of her diagnosis, but it was too little, too late. Fifteen months later, on June 10, 1996, I was with her when she died. My mother was 68 years old.

There isn't a day that I don't miss my parents and that I don't feel cheated by their absence. Some days are tougher than others, though, as was the case last Sunday. It was the 11th anniversary of my mother's passing, and my spigot got turned up full force when the choir at the 9:40 a.m. service in St. Stephen Church sang what's become a powerful gospel anthem, "The Struggle is Over." I wept because they were singing at almost the very hour that, 11 years earlier, my mother's shallow breathing gave way to silence.

The song says, "You've been in this place long enough. Your mountainside has been rough. The struggle is over for you."

Yet, though their struggles are over, I don't feel my parents were here long enough. They didn't die by accident, or unexpectedly. Still, it took years for the cigarette-makers to admit what they had known for years, which is that they had been selling death.

People who are sensible about everything else are often delusional about their smoking habits. They try to persuade themselves that they're making a choice, when the truth is that they're hooked.

Smokers often say, "Everybody is going to die of something one day, and I'm just choosing death by cigarette." Or, they point to someone who has smoked for years and yet survived into old age, implying, of course, that they, too, will be one of the great exceptions.

I know every smoker's delusion because I suffered with them.

But when I quit, I understood the truth of my addiction. I'll spare you most of the ugly details, but for six months I coughed every few minutes. I routinely woke up gagging. I needed an inhaler to help me breathe. It was a hellish half year of my life. And while I didn't say it aloud, I privately feared that I had waited too long to quit, and I wondered not if, but when, I would die.

Of all the people I've known to suffer with smoking-related illnesses, only my mother seemed genuinely shocked when the doctor announced that she had lung cancer.

Nobody has to tell a smoker that his or her persistent cough isn't normal.

So, yes, we are all going to die of something.

But smoking isn't a natural death. It's one of the most preventable forms of premature death, in fact.

Far be it from me to wish ill on any locally owned eatery or bar. But there must be paths to sustained profitability other than catering to addicts."

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist. Her column appears Thursdays in the Community Forum. Read her online at www.courier-journal.com/opinion.

[CommunityAdmin]

I came across this old post. It's interesting to look back and see what people were thinking at the time.