County Fire Marshalls spread the alarm last week that lit or smoldering cigarette butts can cause disaster and have. For instance, a cigarette left in a plastic container damaged 13 apartments near the Algonkian Parkway, costing $2 Million.
As absolutely terrible as this is, we are skirting the even worse disaster that those who are smoking, inhaling these cancerous cigarette fumes, are killing themselves, and putting nearby friends, family, children and workers at risk, and the only saving grace is that smoking is an awful lot slower way to die than a full blaze five-alarm fire.
My Dad got cigarettes for free in the service, during World War II, as did many others in the armed services, then and since. My Dad smoked his whole life after the service, the smoke traveling down his trachea, through his bronchial tubes until the cell lining became cancerous and turned his lungs into a hideous fleshy black and white cellular soup that cost him his life at 68. He never suspected his addiction. He just smoked. My mother smoked because my Dad did. I now visit the crypt their ashes share at Arlington National Cemetery. The only saving grace about cancer is that you get to have those last words with those you love but you also watch them suffer.
These machines that are our bodies that carry around our consciousness work longer than any mechanical machine we use on a daily basis but smoking causes not only cancer but also heart disease, stroke and a variety of lung diseases that cut our lives short.
46 Million Adults are smoking on a daily basis as I write this. 88 million non-smoking Americans are being exposed to cigarette smoke, and here’s a real heart breaker for all responsible adults, 54% of children, ages 3 to 11 years old, are exposed to second hand smoke.
About 443,000 men and women nation-wide will die prematurely this year from smoking or from exposure to second hand smoke.
I had a football coach in High School who told us that his pipe made him safe, as he sucked on it walking up and down the side lines at practice, but it took him (whom we trusted) years to find out that there are larynx, esophageal and oral cancers for those like our coach who thought smokeless tobacco, cigars and pipes were safe.
As for that hew and cry about jobs in America, we’re losing $97 Billion a year in productivity because of smoking.
Some can’t comprehend all this fuss about health care, even though smoking costs us about $96 Billion a year in medical costs.
In Virginia, we live in one of the states that brought us tobacco – and, oh yes, slavery, so that the tobacco industry could be economically feasible when getting its “start;” now they keep costs down by banning collective bargaining, the workers banding together for better working conditions and wages.
You may remember that amazing scene, when seven Tobacco Executives appeared before Congress, raised their right hands and swore that “nicotine is not addictive.” One executive who supported this junk science insisted that cigarettes were no more addictive than coffee, tea or Twinkies. Congressman Henry Waxman dusted him with the rejoinder, “The difference between cigarettes and Twinkies is death.”
We are concerned as a society about a shooting in Florida. We don’t, however, seem to care about the hundreds of thousands of others who die yearly from cigarettes, not the billions in wasted productivity, not the billions more in medical expenses, not the innocent bystanders including children whose only mistake was being near smokers.
We are going to have to save ourselves, our family, our children, and friends ourselves from this plague. The tobacco industry is only concerned about its bottom line. They are never going to do it. In the meantime, while you are still smoking, figuring out how to quit, and save yourself, put out those butts so you don’t burn down your home – or your neighbor’s home either.
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