guitarist wrote:
Doc, the person accepting a myth that the clove cigarettes "not addictive" is very different than claiming cigarettes are "healthy".
Different people. Different fantasy lives and stupid rationales.
I've had people tell me that clove cigs are full of vitamins because cloves are loaded with flavonoids.
I've had smokers light up in my tiny apartment without so much as a glance my way to ask permission. Smokers have left pinholes in my couch and on my grandmother's Persian rug and burn marks on my wooden floors. Smokers fill the corridors of my apartment building with their foulness and choke the elevator wells, the stairwells and the alcove near the parking lot at work with stink clouds and butts.
When I'm exposed to the stuff, my throat gets sore -- and remains sore for days -- my voice gets hoarse, my lungs fill with fluid, I get headaches, my stomach boils and worse. When I explain this to smokers and ask them to stop, the best I can coax from them is that they move away a few feet or step outside -- where they fill the doorway with smoke and blow it inside from there --
but in exchange for this tiny sacrifice on their part, they inevitably force upon me a lecture.
The lecture typically comes in one of two basic forms: 1) how their specific brand/flavor/method-of-inhaling is clean and healthy (after all, nowadays cigarettes are FILTERED! And the filters BIODEGRADE!!) and all of my symptoms would go away if only I'd inhale deeply and stop listening to the popular press and to doctors who get PAID for saying bad things about tobacco. 2) How smokers are the new politically-correct minority to pick on when they're simply -- heroically -- fighting for the right to live (and die) as free men.
There's also the odd duck who pulls out a cigar and lights that up in front of me. His lecture is that cigar tobacco is healthier than cigarette tobacco and his
expensive cigars don't stink like cheap ones.
Meanwhile, I have to hold my breath to keep from vomiting. And yeah. It's so unfair and undemocratic that I don't stand idle
while you poison me. So sorry if that infringes upon your freedom to kill both you and me and to darken otherwise pleasant days with your smoke and butts and burns.
And BTW: Smokers are contributing to the misery in this country even when not poisoning everyone else or leaving butts around. They drive up the cost of MY health insurance because the insurance companies have to carry them when they get high blood pressure and heart-disease and cancer and need expensive medicines; a transplant; a nose, lip, larynx or lung removed.
...
So, when there's action to retard that sickening, filthy sh!t from touching my life, I take heady pleasure in it. If smoking were banned in this country, I'd take it as a job well done.
