Tubes of celestial joy

Reading my mate's blog about addiction got me thinking about smoking. As early as I can remember thinking about the subject at all, I have never been able to understand why anyone would do it. Surrounded as I was by two smoking parents, I have a bazillion memories of how disgusting it is to be around smoke. The air in our lounge was blue, every night, with the fallout from the countless ciggies my folks would puff their way through while watching TV. I often had to escape to the kitchen just to get a breath of air. These days I'd probably have a case against them for "assault by passive smoking" or something.

My Dad used to call cigarettes "tubes of celestial joy" but there was precious little joy in it as far as I could see. He woke up every morning hacking his lungs up, his fingers were stained dark yellow and he died of a lung disease. My Mum is now virtually housebound by chronic emphysema and has to take an inhaler every 2-3 hours to be able to breathe at all. They both smoked from a very early age - pre-teen, I mean.

She defends starting by saying "everyone" did it back then and no-one knew it would do you any harm. Fair comment perhaps but it doesn't explain why she carried on with it for so long, nor why anyone would choose to start now. I've always thought holding a fag, or having one hanging out of your mouth, looks faintly ridiculous, rather than in any way "cool" or macho.

With time, companies scared off by passive smoking lawsuits have gradually banned smoking from the workplace and this has slowly extended to shops and all forms of public transport with the result that there are few places now where I come into contact with it. As a result I'm even more intolerant of it when I do catch a whiff, simply because it is so rare. In the UK we'll soon enjoy a total ban in pubs and restaurants too, and it can't come soon enough for me.

As with many things we take for granted, if smoking were to be "invented" now, it would never be licenced. Imagine that. Leaving aside the balance of the tax revenue argument, there would be fewer deaths from heart disease, lung disease, cancer of all types, pulmonary embolism and stroke. Vast commercial empires that actually deal in death would either never have arisen, or would be diverted to more worthwhile causes. Thousands of hectares of land devoted to growing tobacco could be turned over to food production in areas that need it most.

In fact the more you think about it, the more abhorrent it seems that so many economies can get so badly twisted out of shape, all to feed mankind's addiction to this ... weed.