Column:
Solutions to combat smoking's seductive allure
Published Sept. 22, 2008
I'm going to write about smoking.
Not lecture, but write.
I promise I'm not that annoying girl who coughs pointedly when you light up. "My lungs!" COUGH. "Secondhand smoke!" COUGH. "You're killing me!"
Okay, maybe I'm the girl who actually comes up to you and says, politely, "Please don't smoke. It's really quite disgusting, and it's bad for your health."
Maybe I'm the girl you want to punch, flip off or stab in the lungs with your ashy little cigarette. It wouldn't hurt, but then I'd squeal that you got ugly gray embers on my favorite blouse, and I was just trying to save your life. COUGH.
Yeah, that's probably me.
But secretly, I think smoking is cool. I'm just jealous, because you're cooler than me. I blame Audrey Hepburn - Breakfast at Tiffany's Audrey Hepburn, in her slinky, elegant black Givenchy dress and oversized sunglasses, staring at the diamonds in the display window at Tiffany's and smoking a cigarette. Not just a stubby little cigarette but also a cigarette in a long, slender, feminine and sexy cigarette holder.
Okay, I know I would look affected and ridiculous if I walked around holding a foot-long skinny black thing between my lips. I know I would look like a skunk-haired maniacal Dalmatian-killer, because Cruella De Vil is the only woman in the past forty years who has walked around with a cigarette holder, and she ended up in a mental institution. Still, I think cigarette holders are sexy. Very, very, tres, tres sexy.
But apparently I'm normal. Maybe it's not normal to take fashion cues from puppy murderers (and prostitutes - Did you realize Holly Golightly is a semi-prostitute in the Truman Capote novella?!), but it is normal, apparently, to associate smoking with the coolness factor. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains that most teen smokers associate smoking with somebody cool - their au pair, for example, or their older rebel-without-a-cause brother.
Nobody tries to become addicted. Nobody thinks, "Lalala, I'm bored. From now on I think I'll be a nicotine addict!"
Most people, Gladwell writes, become addicted on accident. They smoke occasionally because it's cool. Smoking a couple cigarettes isn't a problem, he said. Statistics show that there is actually a threshold for nicotine addiction. That people can smoke about four cigarettes (or 5 milligrams of nicotine) a day and be perfectly okay. But once they hit five a day, BAM! They're addicted.
So how can concerned citizens - your mother, ultra-conservatives, Gwen Daniels - combat teen smoking? Not by educating teenagers about the dangers of smoking. COUGH. COUGH. COUGH.
In fact, the average smoker thinks cigarettes are worse than they actually are. Gladwell argues that the government should regulate cigarettes so that even the heaviest smokers could not get anything more than 5 milligrams of nicotine in 24 hours. That level provides enough nicotine for sensation, but not enough to become physiologically addicted.
Studies show that, in a day, most teenagers (okay, probably pre-teens, because wanting to fit in is so middle school) only smoke the number of cigarettes necessary to look cool. If there were less nicotine in the cigarettes, they wouldn't become addicted, and so when they matured and got over the need to look smoke-y cool, they wouldn't turn to cigarettes again.
It's a win-win situation for everybody! Everybody except the people who are already addicted and would have to buy not four, not five, but, oh, 20 packs a day to get their fix. But it's a win-win situation for pre-teens who just want to fit in. And since children are the future of tomorrow, shouldn't everything be about them?
