Informant38

"I haven't smoked or drank for 18 months now, though I still take it day-to- day and pray for help. I believe in prayer and exercise. I have walked five miles a day for a year, without missing even one day. Quitting smoking and drinking has taught me the hardest lesson I've ever learned about my own weakness; it has also given me the greatest affection and empathy for those still addicted.

I have spent some time in the past year and a half in cancer wards. I have seen people gasp for air as a suctioning device cleaned their tracheas. I have heard myself wheezing horribly, unable to catch my breath, as a nurse begged me to breathe. I have seen an 18-year-old with throat cancer who had never smoked a single cigarette in his life. (His mother was a chain smoker.)"

{Joe Eszterhas is a screenwriter who is waking up.


Informant4 responds:

like many people my age(.5 c.) I remember a world blurry with smoke. all the adults I knew with the rarest of exceptions were addicted to tobacco, Catholic nuns being the only group I can think of that as a group were non-smokers, everyone else, priests, doctors, especially teachers, smoked, the individual exceptions being a cause for curiosity. "why don't you smoke?" family reunions were thick with gray down to a few feet off the carpet. an adult identifier in a child's mind being the 'brand' they smoked. Chesterfields for my mother, Pall Malls for my aunt, L&M for my uncle, Camels for my father. I had a friend in high school who smoked Tareytons, a rare thing in those Marlboro years. and I was a militant non-smoker then. a pain in the ass for a girlfriend that smoked. nagging my mom. took a hundred dollars from my uncle in a bet I'd smoke by 21.

three of the four adults closest to me as a child have died from smoking-related illness. the one who hasn't, my mother, quit smoking years ago.
I wish Joe Ezterhas well, and admire him for his humility, and his humanity. but my honest response to his piece in the New York Times is to point to another unspoken, more deeply unrecognized, taboo. these are taboos. ask any kid who made any kind of anti-smoking noise in the 50's and early 60's. we were slapped down hard. and even more unquestioned was the prevalence of automobiles and all they brought with them. including the rearranged faces and truncated lives of a lot of kids.
my mom was an x-ray tech so I saw some first-hand trauma without being directly involved in it. a significant bunch of images when you're 10.

I would like to see a white cross at every spot on every road, street, or avenue where someone has died in a car wreck. I guarantee you that within 3 years you wouldn't be able to get little kids in the car to go anywhere. that's who shifted the smoking thing from accepted norm to its retro non-pc, 'white trash', hardcore image. a direct result of the education of the very young. but talking seriously about the addiction to gasoline is a deeper taboo, and the oil/auto idustry is far more impregnable than tobacco companies ever were. so we're up against a powerful enemy here. and it's pretty late in the day. but in the interest of the well-fought battle here's some numbers.

from the World Health Organisation
and the US Bureau of Transportation
and the Federal Highway Administration
and the Center for Disease Control

while it's true that the actual annual mortality stats for smoking are much higher, the injury numbers make it a radically different story. the crippling effects of smoking are far more likely to lead to death. the ratio of injury, non-fatal to fatal numbers for traffic 'crashes' are from about 40 to 1 to about 100 to 1 depending on when and where you are in the world.
everyone you know has either been in a bad or fatal wreck or knows/knew someone who has. the first kneejerk response, a result of media training, is to blame it on 'drunk driving'. a response which is close to what the tobacco companies created with their massively funded propaganda about 'choice'. the idea that people were coerced, manipulated, brainwashed into harming themselves this way strikes too close to the heart of the beast to get a truly open hearing. but it's true.

aside from the dubious categorization of every traffic fatality with measurable blood alcohol in a driver as alcohol-influenced, there is the anti-puritanical but historically obvious fact that alcohol has been part of the human social pharmacolgy for thousands of years, the car a means of transport for less than a hundred. couple that with the unconscionably high fatality rates for bicyclists and pedestrians and the idea that drunk driving is the problem is shown for what it is, a smokescreen. this is without mentioning the air and its poisons, and the unsheltering sky.

automobile 'accidents' are the leading cause of death for children and young adults, ages 1-33.
the leading cause of death.
these children are dying unnecessarily, there is no evolutionary fitness, no biological rightness to it at all. it is virtually random. the leading cause of death for children is not a disease or any other 'natural' cause, but a purely mathematical culling. a decimation.