Yes, smoking kills — but here’s why I love it anyway

[Dan]

Dan Posted: Aug 23, 2016 at 5:45pm

Yes, smoking kills — but here’s why I love it anyway
Elisha Maldonado, New York Post, August 26 2015

This article was printed in the New York Post and highlights some of the unspoken thoughts of a silent number of smokers. Namely, the pleasure.

"The number of New Yorkers who smoke is up to 16.1 percent in 2013, the latest numbers available, from 14 percent in 2010. They say numbers don’t lie, only people do. But at the very least, these numbers are guilty of a lie of omission.

Why? Because the numbers say nothing about love.

Beautiful, beautiful love. Much as nanny-staters might be loath to admit it, some people just love to smoke. Count me among them. There’s nothing like that first heady pull — preferably, if you ask me, on a fire escape in winter, with a good mate and a mug of whiskey."

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Yet even Elisha has been duped by the ever increasing hysteria pervading the press about smoking.

"And look, I know all about the warning label affixed to every pack of Marlboro Reds I buy. I know — and believe — what the surgeon general says. The myth persists that most smokers don’t actually think smoking is deadly. It’s just that — a myth."

Maybe the myth is true? Like everything in life, smoking is NOT deadly, unless a person really abuses it. Nobody fell over an died from smoking a few ciggies a day, just like one drink is virtually harmless. I worked for years in an old peoples residential home where lifelong smokers smoked 80 a day trying to smoke themselves to death; they couldnt, and died from natural causes. Yet smokers and non smokers get Cancer every day. I have leukemia. What happened to live fast, have fun, die young?

"Basically, cigarettes are the barometer for a good or a bad time — unspoken, they allow you to move seamlessly through your evening sans awkward conversation-killers.
They’re also a time for solitude, of taking a moment or three for oneself. A respite. A time to live in the space between a light and an ember; a time to live in the space of an inhale and an exhale; a time to live in a space between the first light and the last drag. It’s self-contained, yet somehow expansive."

Thats deep! It seems even the art of smoking can induce a state of rare philosophy. She continues:

"As one of my more inveterate smoker friends put it, he smokes to ponder his own mortality, as if the act of smoking forces him to ask — knowing that it could kill him — if he’s living his life well. And he lives in the hope that he is.

Here’s the thing: Every smoker knows that each cigarette has a delicious start, a somewhat interesting middle, and an end that is occasionally satisfying, but always comes too soon.

Perhaps the life of a smoker might reflect, to some degree, the life of the smoke.

And the life of you nonsmokers, too, for that matter. Which you’d already know — if you smoked."

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Link to full article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171012113 ... it-anyway/