Misery for Profit

Tobacco

For years I always used to see ads for cigarettes featuring groups of attractive young people, engaged in some outdoor activity, smiling, laughing, showing their white teeth, looking so happy. I always thought, why don't you show the truth? Why don't you show my grandma, a withered husk of a woman, one yellow tooth in her head, coughing, coughing, coughing? Decades of emphysema and asthma and still reaching for her Pall Malls. Gosh, such brand loyalty. What a great billboard that would make.

Finally she died of cancer. She weighed about 70 pounds when she died. She lingered for months longer than anyone thought she would. That wasn't a good thing. She was in terrible pain. She wanted to die.

After she died, I wondered if watching her own mother die of cancer might inspire my mother to try to stop smoking. "Oh no," she said, "she didn't die from smoking. It wasn't lung cancer."

Well, no, the cancer wasn't only in her lungs. It was throughout her entire body! Did she honestly think that a lifetime of heavy smoking had nothing to do with her cancer? Talk about denial! So she had no intention of quitting.

I grew up in a household of smokers. Both my parents smoked. Everything I owned reeked of tobacco smoke. Smelling it on my clothes, teachers asked me if I smoked. I couldn't even smell it, as it had dulled my sense of smell to almost nothing, but I often had respiratory infections. No one could figure out why I had such a bad cough. The strongest prescription cough medicine in existence did nothing for it.

Studies have shown that children who grow up with smokers are more likely to develop asthma. I eventually developed asthma. Tobacco smoke is my worst trigger. If I'm exposed to it, I can't breathe. I'm lucky that I didn't develop asthma until adulthood. If I had developed it when I was still living with my parents, they would not have stopped smoking just because I couldn't breathe. My mother has asthma herself, and she still smokes. She's an addict. She doesn't care about health.

I understand that nicotine is incredibly addictive and that it's amazingly hard to quit smoking. I've read it's more addictive than cocaine or heroin. What I don't understand is why anyone starts. There can't be anyone alive on this planet who doesn't know how harmful tobacco is and how addictive it is. So why would anyone start smoking? When I've put this query to my mother, she said, "Well, we didn't know how harmful it was when I started." Well, maybe she didn't know, but other people did. Scientists have known for hundreds of years that smoking was harmful. It wasn't some well kept secret. And common sense will tell anyone that inhaling smoke into one's lungs probably isn't a healthy thing to do. So I'm not buying it.

People start because they're convinced it's a cool thing to do. I understand that, and yet I don't understand it. It makes sense as a powerful motive for people to do something, so I understand it from that point of view. But to me it's so obviously a really stupid thing to do, not cool at all, that I think anyone who would think it's a cool thing to do would have to be a complete idiot, so I don't understand it. A lot of smokers are idiots, but occasionally I meet a smoker who isn't, and I wonder how'd they get hooked? (Well, actually, I meet more intelligent ex-smokers, but something must have made them start smoking all the same.) Granted, virtually all smokers start smoking as young teenagers, an age not known for clarity in judgment.

So, why is smoking perceived as cool among young teenagers, who are not legally allowed to buy cigarettes? Tobacco corporations know that this is the age when virtually all smokers begin smoking. No one starts smoking as an adult. Adults know better. So the corporations are marketing their product to an audience that is not legally allowed to buy it because they have to become addicted to it before they reach the legal age to purchase it. That's sinister. They'll deny it of course. They'll say they only want adults to buy their products. But if no teenagers buy their products now and get addicted, they won't have any new customers.

So they show images appealing to young people, people having fun. Or they show images of sophisticated people, letting the young people imagine themselves being older and sophisticated. They like that. The ads have warnings, of course, but they're nothing the young people can really relate to. Does a 13-year-old care about smoking causing low birth weight? Maybe instead of a verbal warning there could just be two photographs side by side: a healthy, normal lung, and the lung of a smoker. Just put that on every pack of cigarettes.

Actually, what I'd really like to see happen is this: you want your nicotine? You can have your nicotine. You have to use a patch though. There would be no more cigarettes, cigars or loose tobacco. There would only be the patch. You want to poison yourself? Fine. Poison yourself. But there would be no more secondhand smoke. No one would be allowed to poison their children, their pets or any other adults. The air would be breathable.

The patch isn't cool? Teenagers wouldn't start using the patch? Tobacco corporations wouldn't keep raking in obscene amounts of money? Good.

Alcohol

The only substance as harmful as tobacco and yet just as encouraged is alcohol. Unlike tobacco, some people who use alcohol get addicted to it and some people don't. My grandma, in addition to being a chain smoker, was also an alcoholic. She slurred her speech. She smelled bad. My mother and I would visit her, and she would have no recollection that we had been there. And, quite frankly, she was a bitch.

When I think of alcohol, I think of my grandmother. I have never had any desire to drink. Why would I want to be like her? When I was in high school, other students drank surreptitiously. Their greatest desire was to spend the weekend getting drunk. I couldn't think of anything more idiotic. Why would they want to be like my grandmother?

In college, everyone looked forward to being 21, the legal drinking age. I avoided drinkers. Being around people who are drinking has always made me uncomfortable. It took me a long time to even understand that not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic, that some people do just drink a small amount and then stop.

I decided a long time ago that it would be best if I just never drank. Not only was my grandmother an alcoholic, but her first husband, my biological grandfather, was also an alcoholic. With two alcoholic grandparents in the genetic mix, it seemed like it was asking for trouble.

I've never met Jimmy Don Rodgers. I don't know for certain that he's an alcoholic and not just someone who likes to drink. I'm guessing from his actions though that he is an addict. Since he was arrested on a DUI charge, held in jail for 12 hours and released, and then his next step was to go get drunk and high on drugs again, I think it's a safe bet that he's an alcoholic and a drug addict. If he was just someone who liked to drink, he probably wouldn't have gone and got drunk again right after being released from jail. But Rodgers did. And then he got in his white pickup truck and he killed my best friend.

I miss Ken so much it aches. It's been nearly four months since his death, and I still cry almost every day. We were so close, such kindred spirits, that I never had any doubt that we would be best friends for the rest of our lives. I just never dreamed that the rest of Ken's life would be so short, that he would just be taken from me, just like that. I loved Ken. And now he's gone. My best friend is gone. All because Jimmy Don Rodgers had to go and get drunk.

I've been told that some day I won't feel this pain so acutely, but that it will be there always. I will have this pain for the rest of my life. Jimmy Don Rodgers did this to me.

Is there any answer?

All my life, whenever people have started criticizing alcohol, other people have been quick to point out, "Well, we tried Prohibition, and that didn't work." Ok, Prohibition didn't work. But that doesn't mean what we have now is working either.

If I was ruler of the world, there would be no advertising of alcohol at all. The manufacturers could not advertise, stores couldn't advertise, bars and restaurants couldn't advertise, no one. They could sell it. I trust people would find it. But no marketing. No glamorizing alcohol. No encouraging people to buy their product. I include product placement in movies and tv shows as advertising too. That would not be allowed.

Bars and restaurants would not be allowed to sell alcohol to anyone who was driving. George Carlin asked, "Why do bars have parking lots?" I can see that someone may have a designated driver, so it's not entirely unreasonable to have a parking lot, but there needs to be a system to make sure anyone who drives does not drink alcohol. If two people drive separately and meet in the bar, the bartender needs to be able to distinguish them from two people who come together. I propose that any parking lot of a bar or a restaurant where alcohol is served should have a gate with an attendant where cars must enter. If the driver is the only adult in the car, he or she will receive a red stamp on his or her hand, signifying that no alcohol is to be served. If more than one adult is in the car, they must agree at that time who will drive home. That person will receive a red stamp on the hand, the others blue stamps. Everyone will be carded at the gate. Anyone without ID will get a red stamp. Only people with blue stamps will be served alcohol.

I realize my ideas wouldn't solve everything. People will find a way to get high off of almost anything. I hope that some day our society won't be so screwed up that people are so miserable they feel they need to escape their daily lives. But corporations that sell alcohol and tobacco encourage people to become addicted to their products because it's "good business" even though their products kill millions of people and cause untold misery. I think that's just wrong. Intentionally causing misery because it's profitable is simply evil.