Editorial - I'm an addict

Truth in advertising I guess.  Who's next?

Chris Davis, Pincher Creek Voice

I smoked my first cigarette when I was six or seven years old.  My mom smoked Players Plain, unfiltered monsters that my lungs could certainly never put up with for even a day now, three decades of dedicated practice later.  She always kept a carton of them under her bed, and in those days they weren't the expensive commodities that they are now, so I used to steal a pack from her now and then with little fear of being found out.

Seriously.

Why did I start smoking?  The memories of that age are of course shrouded by the passage of time and the veneer of the fables we all tend to tell ourselves about our pasts.  What I do remember was wanting to be like the cool older kids, those mystical 13 year-olds.  I remember wanting to be like the Marlboro man, a manly man with a big horse, a big hat, a lariat.  He was cool under pressure, almost as cool as Joe the Camel.

Subliminal much, Joe?

Joe, now there was a character.  A cartoon used to sell the idea of smoking to a new generation of customers.  After all, the customer base did have a tendency to die young somehow.  By the time my peers were testing their cool on Popeye's I was training my young lungs on the real thing. For those too young to remember, a "Popeye" was a sugar concoction play/training cigarette sold in cute little cigarette packs with the namesake cartoon hero of the time on the front.  Every corner store sold them.

Try some! Buy Some!
They'll make you strong, honest.

I can remember my parents debating a magazine article in which the cigarette manufacturers were disputing claims that these things might be bad for us, suing dying suckers out of their last penny so they would die faster if they dared "libel" the product.

The first pack of smokes I ever bought for myself came from a machine in the lobby of a neighborhood apartment building in Calgary, back in a distant and fabled time called the '70's.  It cost me 99 cents, and I paid the machine with pennies.  Twenty years later, when I lived in that same building, it was gone and I had to go all the way to the store to get my fix, a task made more arduous by the continuing decline in my ability to breathe properly.

Cigarette ads were everywhere.  Magazines. TV.  Cigarette companies were one of the biggest sponsors of sporting events.  Nothing goes with a good game of hockey or  tennis like a ciggie dangling dangerously from the corner of your lip.  Unfortunately, in my case I went from being an avid and better than average long-distance runner/cyclist/swimmer to being the out-of-breath guy at the back in about 5 years. Death-dealer DuMaurier was closely associated with Jazz, because nothing goes with playing a wind instrument like chronic bronchitis.

Smoke was everywhere.  It was pretty common for the home to be filled with smoke.  You could smoke while you shopped.  Yeah, doesn't that seem like an oddity now?  I remember shopping for clothes, while puffing away, just like many of the other shoppers.  It wasn't really an unusual thing.  Rude, sure, looking back, but completely an everyday activity.  It was the norm up until my mid-20's, when the rules started to change.

I moved around a lot as a kid, not my choice, but there you go.  For a period of about three years I was the new guy in town, in a different town almost every year, the guy who demonstrated my cool by blowing smoke rings, inhaling deeply, exhaling through my nose, all the good stuff.  Folks would gather 'round to learn my secrets.  I got beat up less too, a bonus when you're the new kid from Alberta in Quebec, or the new kid from Quebec in Alberta.  More than one kid bummed his first smoke from me.  That's a guilt that never really quite goes away.  I'm sure I helped kill some of them early.

I quit in grade 7 once, so I know I can quit anytime.  I'm just not a quitter.  Insert laugh.

By High School I was a pack-a-day dude.  I smoked 'em all.  Gauloises.  Don't do it!  Turkish cigarettes were dirt cheap because they were half dirt.

Then I graduated, bought the company, made me some dough, and ramped it up to two packs a day, three if it was a bar night.  Two packs for $5 if you filled your tank at the gas station, no big deal.

At the time I worked a schedule that made my present 16-18 hour days seem like a piece of cake.  Fueled by cigarettes, coffee, sugar cubes, 7-11 hamburgers, and Jolt Cola (sigh: that was the good stuff) I'd often work 24 hour shifts or longer, my average week consisting of four sleeps, six 12 to 20 hour workdays, and two party-hearty nights.

So what I'm saying is, George Burns had nothing on me.  Google him, kids.

So yeah, I was just out of school, I danced like a fool.  I was a wild one.  A real wild child.

So let's fast-forward 25 years or so.   All of a sudden, I'm huddling out in the cold with one or two other social outcasts, getting the flu and some more bronchitis for the sheer joy of... hmmm...I'm still not really sure after all this time what I really get out of it, in terms of positives. Everything I own stinks.  Lucky for me I've been smoking so long my sense of smell has diminished to irrelevance.   The ladies don't want to kiss me anywhere near as much as they did back when it seemed like everyone smoked.  My dancing days are over.  I guess I hung on to the "fool" part of the previous equation.  At least half the accommodations for rent anywhere I've lived are closed to me and my kind.  I can't dangle one off my lip as I belly up to the bar anymore, either.  It no longer enhances my pool playing.  When I go shopping I'm forced to go without.  Don't even get me started on 3-hour MD meetings obviously masterminded by THEM, the clean-living ones.

Let's figure it out in dollar terms.  Let's say I smoke a pack a day and have since, say, 1975.  A conservative estimate, but why not.  In today's prices, buying the discount brand, that's about $70 a week.  $3640 a year.  $134, 680. A small house.

Now, after a long and unfulfilling smoking career, I have no days without coughing, phlegm, short-windedness, pain, and regret.  I wake up, I have a good cough as I light my first smoke, and then I contemplate my second.  It's been hours, after all.

I can't imagine not smoking.  I can't remember not smoking

Thank you, Popeye death-trainers. Thank you, Marlboro Man.  Oh right, he died of lung cancer.   The bad guy smokes in movies now, not the hero.   When I die, it will most likely be from causes directly related to my addiction.  My life will probably be decades shorter than the time I would have else-wise had.

Cool is for fools.

I'm glad I got that off my chest.  I only smoked three cigarettes while writing it.

Breathless in Pincher,
Chris Davis

See also:
$27B tobacco lawsuit starts in Montreal
Cigarette giant to deny cancer link
Cancer by the Carton