You have to be one brainless asshole to start smoking these days.
Billboards tell you that your dick won't work if you smoke. Packs of cigarettes in the States announce that you are going to die and your child is going to be born with not enough eyeballs if you smoke. In some countries like Canada, Brazil, and Thailand, they've tried plastering packs with actual pictures of diseased lungs and rotted teeth.
Cigarette purchasers are undeterred. Either they're already hooked or they've totally bought into the neatly packaged glamour of the rebellious, sexy, counter-culture image that requires a smoldering cigarette dangling from your lips.
Cigarettes are not sexy. Sure, there's a certain languid charm played out as Lauren Bacall wraps those lips around a fag, drags, inhales, and exhales, but they'll never show Bacall at Bogart's deathbed as he's dying from throat cancer.
Unless you're a smoker yourself, fucking a smoker can be a lot less fun too. There's that lingering nicotine stink that interferes with a lover's scent. Lips don't taste like lips. Skin doesn't smell like skin. Even the delightful female musk is tainted. All this doesn't apply if you're bombed out of your gourd.
Of course, most people, male or female, would do a parking meter if soused enough.
I've smoked two cigarettes in my life: once while drunk and shrooming (but not stoned) under a jewel-studded desert night and once while drinking myself to puking on the local corn beer (*shudder*) in a Belgian hostel. If I'm drunk enough, cigarette smoke tastes good, like a dark, rich pipe tobacco.
Luckily, I am very seldom drunk and I realize that something that seems like a good idea while inebriated usually isn't when you're sober.
The silly thing is that most people are fucking stupid until they learn that they're not immortal. Some people make it through their teens without decapitating themselves or starting smoking. Some folks never learn this basic fact of existence. These are the folks who scream down the highway at their usual cruising speed of 85 mph, playing Pole Position with the rest of traffic as visibility is down to 50 meters due to the downpour. These are the folks who have "accidents." The only tragedy here is that they too often take innocent bystanders out with them as they smear themselves into raspberry jam.
So it's good to know that countries like Canada, Brazil, and Thailand are in the vanguard of the anti-smoking movement. They can afford to be, not having a multi-billion-dollar industry cranking out the coffin nails.
And it's a funny thing: as the rest of the world is starting to sound all new-agey, healthy, and responsible with its tobacco treaty, can you guess what the U.S. is busy doing? Do a google search on "tobacco treaty geneva weaken" and prepare to grind your molars.
Why the hell shouldn't the U.S. be able to curb smoking in its borders while exporting its product to a wheezing world? After all, the 13-year-old kids smoking two packs a day in Pakistan don't vote. They sure as fuck don't contribute to any political action committee. Their idea of soft money is enough rupee to buy another soft pack of Marlboros. They don't have much chance for their dads to pay their way through Harvard or Yale as they snort cocaine, bathe in mountains of oil cash, and wrangle the entire United States government with their cadre of back-slapping, dick-sucking daisy chain plutocratic fuck buddies.
But then some of those 13-year old kids might grow up and travel to the land of pornography, Big Macs, and planet raping foreign and environmental policies. Maybe one of those lucky boys will get to wear a vest of explosives and go strolling through the local mall.
Maybe I should be more charitable. As I write this, I realize that it could all be a grand, dark, and devious strategy. It could be the master stroke that will put an end to the perpetual and laughable War on Terror. It's all so clear now.
Send our cigarettes overseas, get the terror demographic smoking as early as possible, and hopefully the firebrand youths will be growing sticky cauliflowers in their throats and lungs before they can hijack a plane or poison a reservoir.
Brilliant.
Pakeha