We Love Cigarettes.
With the steps being taken to decrease the smoking habit, it is interesting how recent findings have put pay to many a notion that smoking releases tension and maybe something all smokers should think about. We are indeed a bizarre race, we know it kills - nigh on a million people a year die in China alone from the causes of smoking, and during the 20th century over 100 million of the worlds population died because of it.

When I started smoking in the fifties it was the social thing to do, "it liberates, stimulates and inspires" was the message going out, in fact we were told it was good for us in many ways, it gave us confidence and reassurance. Of course we knew no different then As an RAF medic I was trained to treat an injured patient with a cigarette, coffee and reassurance, we just had no idea that our love affair with smoking could kill so many and sometimes so cruelly. But would it have made any
difference if we did?. During the war we were more than likely to be killed by enemy action . It was sociable to smoke, just look at the old movies - lighting up a fag was part of the script.
But taking the positive decision to give it up is no mean task, it has to be that one really wants to do it, or in my case a huge warning when my heart nearly gave out - three years later I developed a huge abdominal aneurism and was told that if I had still been smoking, I could not have undergone the major operation. I would be no more. I feel like going out there and shouting out loud to all those who smoke and over the age of 50 - who are vulnerable to aneurisms - to stop now, but of course it could never work

As a reformed smoker I now understand the extreme dangers given to passive smoking and feel frustrated I am unable to tell folks who merrily smoke and drive with children inhaling the fumes in the car, and how bad taking in the poisonous fumes are and how it very nearly killed me. As a smoker I really believed if you did it outside it didn't matter - wrong! - Waiting in a queue behind a smoker or having a smoker anywhere near you and you will know just how strong the fumes are.
Smoking cigarettes seems likened to pollution and climate change, we wont stop until it effects us personally, then often it will be too late. And a recent test proves that the dangers of passive smoking are in the furniture too which is really bad news for kids.

But the signs , at least in the Western world are that we are accepting smoking as ever more anti social, remembering it has no boundaries and infringes passive smoking on others. But in China the deadly habit increases; whereas hardly any Chinese women smoked they do now in increasing numbers under the banner of woman's liberation, which has recently caught on there, and a massive one third of the worlds production of cigarettes is sold in China.

It seems in Britain mostly women smoke now, and the younger element too, when we were kids, okay we smoked, but we did it behind the bicycle shelter so it had to be moderated, now of course it children's lib time too and there they are, as bold as you like, openly smoking and the frustrating thing is we can't do a thing about it. I am thinking: those so young being poisoned so early, with the sure fact that they will live ten years less and an estimated half of the population, unless curbed now, will die early.

Crazy, crazy, but we still do it don't we? - well lots still do. Come to think of it in the early part of the 20th century, epidemiologists thought tarmac and motor cars caused cancer, the idea of smoking causing it was ousted, they were under the misapprehension that smoking was harmless so why knock it., right?
Wrong!

Learn more about this author, Peter Carroll.
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