On a good day, it takes 10 cigarettes to write a column.
On a bad day, I often have one in the ashtray and one between the lips — wreathed in smoke — which partly accounts for going through a pack of 25 in a couple of hours.
The job is killing me.
But none of you are going to make it out alive either.
No doubt I’m turning grey on the inside as well as the outside, the lobes of my lungs saturated with tar and nicotine, hydrogen cyanide (reading the package here) and formaldehyde, like the splayed sere wings of a giant moth that’s been zap-fried on the porch light. (See, that sentence alone required two fag units, if I were keeping a tally Bridget Jones style.)
I don’t need to imagine what I look like inside the ribcage. This here pack of du Maurier provides a depictive warning — cancer porn devised by the anti-smoking lobby.
While cigarettes are now deemed such a visual hazard to the populace that the (legal) product must be locked away in no-see-through shelves, secreted behind the counter in convenience stores that were once called smoke shops, we the offending perps must be illustratively assaulted for our intransigence — strafed with images of necrotic ventricles, sad-eyed children staring accusingly at smoke-eater parents, tombstone teeth and blackened gums, and suggestively limp cylinders of ash.
(In a West Midlands town, a 70-year-old widow was recently threatened with a $100 fine for dropping cigarette ash on the pavement. “I still can’t believe what happened. I was sitting at a bus stop quietly enjoying a cigarette and from nowhere a warden appeared and accused me of littering. I was only smoking a cigarette. It is one of the few things I can afford to buy myself.’’)
After more than six years of study and ad experimentation and focus-grouping on the public dime — who says public dogoodness isn’t a self-perpetuating job creation industry? — Ottawa has halted plans that would have compelled tobacco companies to update and further grotesque-icize the Alert! Alert! Alert! on cigarettes, possibly even expanding the warning to 90 per cent of packaging surface.
Because smokers are apparently blind as well as stupid. Why not include one of those micro-controller activated singing cards inside as well? “Suicide is painless … la-la-la…’’
Emblazoned weapons of mass destruction warnings first appeared nine years ago and have been getting ever more macabre, though their effectiveness is debatable. For many of us, the intended panic-prompts have become pictogram white noise once the entire set has been collected.
Admittedly, I was not looking forward to one particular scheme floated, which was to have slapped on the package a photo of dying Alberta cancer patient Barb Tarbox, who spent the last months of her life warning Canadians about the consequences of smoking. As I recall, an emaciated Yul Brynner did similar public service messages years earlier and the Marlboro Man also. So far, Joe the Camel has no epiphany.
Regardless of one’s vice, few of us respond well to je m’accuse admonitions from death-bed repenters. If nico-jolted into considering the damage I’m inflicting on myself, probably my first inclination would be to fire up a nerve-soothing dart.
I’ve no idea why Health Canada walked away from “enhancement’’ of scare tactic labelling on cigarette packages, unless they’ve lost their eek-mojo among the constituency of puffers. Like our blunted taste buds, maybe our mental shock absorbers have been desensitized.
The anti-smoking lobby, taken aback when the decision was revealed at a closed-door meeting in Newfoundland recently — because they are totally used to getting their way — has been grumbling about the feds getting all cowed by Big Tobacco, which had forcefully objected to the ratcheting-up of Don’t Buy This! counter-sales pitch.
That seems unlikely, given that governments the world over have aggressively demonized smoking and made it damn near impossible to enjoy a cigarette in peace, whether in a bar, a psychiatric ward or on Death Row.
The Canadian Medical Association smacks the feds around in an editorial published in the newest edition of the country’s leading medical journal, which maybe you can read in a doctor’s waiting room, assuming your physician is not among those health practitioners copy-catting some local hospitals and banning mags as germ transmitters. Perhaps they can provide gowns and latex gloves for the page-turning purpose. (Note: Newspapers hot off the press are germ-free.)
Instead, Health Canada says it will focus efforts on the growing problem of contraband tobacco. Seems that’s a law enforcement issue rather than a health matter but not complaining here.
And now, pardon while I kiss butt.
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