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07-03-2015, 02:20 PM
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
”LOOK, look!” The seven-year-old whispers in horror and pity. It’s a man smoking. The kids never see one.
She’s intrigued and appalled at this person sucking on a lit paper stick, this relic of a bygone age. Poor, deluded man from some weaker, 20th century species. The child walks slowly past, mouth agape, as if he’s a remnant of some alien race of delusional thickos who knew no better. She’s witnessing in living splendour one of those strange social foibles of last century — and these backward people still exist! I guess, for us, it’d be like walking past a man in hose taking snuff.
What a generational turnaround. So much for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita and the granite-jawed Marlboro Man. Smoking has become a public declaration of stupidity. Lack of control. A habit reserved for the pathetic and easily led, the delusional, poor and weak. You’d never catch George Clooney with a cigarette now — “I’m a big non-smoker” — but if he’d been around in the nightclubs of the ’50s I bet you would have, with a wicked grin, a tux and his bow tie undone (let us pause for a moment just to consider that image). Yet with my generation something’s going on: the 50-year itch, if you like. Several girlfriends have recently taken up smoking again after decades of abstinence and the tsunami of difference that’s child-rearing. Why now? To lose weight. They tell me it works. I tell them to think of their kids. One mate had a mother who was instructed to take up smoking by her GP when she was pregnant, to combat morning sickness. I say “had”. Yep, lung cancer.
On a recent trip to Paris I was struck by how many people still smoke, huddling outside buildings in the freezing cold as if they’ve got huge invisible signs on their foreheads shouting “company loser”. An esteemed novelist vacated a dinner with a violent suddenness. “He has to have a cigarette every hour or he goes mad,” his Parisian friend explained drily. He was young but already wearing the ravages of his habit; fingertips stained the colour of wee, the smell clinging to him like a thick coat of shame. In his moment of cigarette-induced desperation all my admiration was replaced by pity: to be so trapped.
US satirical talk show host John Oliver recently praised our country’s ground-breaking plain packaging laws, a triumph of the Gillard years. Oliver explained that Australians could now only buy cigarette packets with images such as “the toe-tag on a corpse, the cancerous mouth, the nightmarish eyeball and the diseased lung”. I’m proud of this law. It feels fresh, progressive, caring, world-beating, when so much of what Australia’s done, or said, in the international arena over the past few years frankly doesn’t.
But tobacco companies are now mutating like an evil virus as they muscle in on a brave new market — e-cigarettes. These produce nicotine vapour and are intended for use by adults weaning themselves off smoking, but “vaping” is becoming big business among the young. A recent US survey of 50,000 students in 400 schools showed that twice as many teenagers are using e-cigarettes as conventional ones. Is vaping the new gateway to nicotine addiction?
Dr Wilson Compton, from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, says: “Nicotine … produces changes in heart rate and blood pressure, can be dangerous in high doses, and certainly wouldn’t be recommended for the adolescent brain.” He said parents mustn’t assume that vaping has no consequences. The question is, will the seven-year-olds’ repulsed generation be one day lured across to the dark side by a bubble gum or milkshake flavoured e-cigarette? (Yes, both exist.) Compton says parents play a huge role when it comes to nicotine: “Parents are our most important tool for shaping teenager behaviour, and they may not see [vaping] as risky.” It is.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life...-1227248194583 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/smoking-has-become-a-public-declaration-of-stupidity/story-e6frg8h6-1227248194583)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.singsupplies.com/showthread.php?202118-Smoking-has-become-a-public-declaration-of-stupidity&goto=newpost).
”LOOK, look!” The seven-year-old whispers in horror and pity. It’s a man smoking. The kids never see one.
She’s intrigued and appalled at this person sucking on a lit paper stick, this relic of a bygone age. Poor, deluded man from some weaker, 20th century species. The child walks slowly past, mouth agape, as if he’s a remnant of some alien race of delusional thickos who knew no better. She’s witnessing in living splendour one of those strange social foibles of last century — and these backward people still exist! I guess, for us, it’d be like walking past a man in hose taking snuff.
What a generational turnaround. So much for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita and the granite-jawed Marlboro Man. Smoking has become a public declaration of stupidity. Lack of control. A habit reserved for the pathetic and easily led, the delusional, poor and weak. You’d never catch George Clooney with a cigarette now — “I’m a big non-smoker” — but if he’d been around in the nightclubs of the ’50s I bet you would have, with a wicked grin, a tux and his bow tie undone (let us pause for a moment just to consider that image). Yet with my generation something’s going on: the 50-year itch, if you like. Several girlfriends have recently taken up smoking again after decades of abstinence and the tsunami of difference that’s child-rearing. Why now? To lose weight. They tell me it works. I tell them to think of their kids. One mate had a mother who was instructed to take up smoking by her GP when she was pregnant, to combat morning sickness. I say “had”. Yep, lung cancer.
On a recent trip to Paris I was struck by how many people still smoke, huddling outside buildings in the freezing cold as if they’ve got huge invisible signs on their foreheads shouting “company loser”. An esteemed novelist vacated a dinner with a violent suddenness. “He has to have a cigarette every hour or he goes mad,” his Parisian friend explained drily. He was young but already wearing the ravages of his habit; fingertips stained the colour of wee, the smell clinging to him like a thick coat of shame. In his moment of cigarette-induced desperation all my admiration was replaced by pity: to be so trapped.
US satirical talk show host John Oliver recently praised our country’s ground-breaking plain packaging laws, a triumph of the Gillard years. Oliver explained that Australians could now only buy cigarette packets with images such as “the toe-tag on a corpse, the cancerous mouth, the nightmarish eyeball and the diseased lung”. I’m proud of this law. It feels fresh, progressive, caring, world-beating, when so much of what Australia’s done, or said, in the international arena over the past few years frankly doesn’t.
But tobacco companies are now mutating like an evil virus as they muscle in on a brave new market — e-cigarettes. These produce nicotine vapour and are intended for use by adults weaning themselves off smoking, but “vaping” is becoming big business among the young. A recent US survey of 50,000 students in 400 schools showed that twice as many teenagers are using e-cigarettes as conventional ones. Is vaping the new gateway to nicotine addiction?
Dr Wilson Compton, from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, says: “Nicotine … produces changes in heart rate and blood pressure, can be dangerous in high doses, and certainly wouldn’t be recommended for the adolescent brain.” He said parents mustn’t assume that vaping has no consequences. The question is, will the seven-year-olds’ repulsed generation be one day lured across to the dark side by a bubble gum or milkshake flavoured e-cigarette? (Yes, both exist.) Compton says parents play a huge role when it comes to nicotine: “Parents are our most important tool for shaping teenager behaviour, and they may not see [vaping] as risky.” It is.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life...-1227248194583 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/smoking-has-become-a-public-declaration-of-stupidity/story-e6frg8h6-1227248194583)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://www.singsupplies.com/showthread.php?202118-Smoking-has-become-a-public-declaration-of-stupidity&goto=newpost).