SMOKE SIGNALS

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY START

     You know that smoking is very bad for your health.  Make sure your kids know it, too.  Tell your kids not to smoke.  Studies show they will listen.  Start when your kids are young. 

     If you smoke, try to quit.  Be a good role model for your kids.  Tell your kids how hard it is to have a bad habit.  Let them know that you wish you had never started smoking.

     You might find out that your kids have tried cigarettes.  Ask them what they like about it.  Point out some bad things about smoking, such as the smell.  Plus, it is very expensive.  Make it clear smoking is not allowed in your family.

Next I found a spent matchbook with the Harborside Lobstermania imprint on the cover.  The matches on the inside had all been lit at once, while all still attached inside the book.  I glanced across the burnt tips and singed matchbook backing.  Pyromania!  Imprinted on the inside cover was a map that led from the very spot where I’d picked up the match book on along Water Street, up King Street to US RT 1 and RT 104, the very path, incidentally, I had already chosen to walk home.
 

I came across lots of cigarette butts, more Marlboro packages, including one printed in Russian, a package for Newports, and another for Camel.  Of all the warning labels, I noticed that the Cheyenne packaging had the most honest message:  WARNING: Smoking Cigars Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, And Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.  This Product Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California To Cause Cancer And Birth Defects And Other Reproductive Harm.   I couldn’t help but note the Emphsysis of all the Initial Caps.  The Marlboro package statement was more vague: SURGEON GENERAL WARNING: QUITTING SMOKING NOW GREATLY REDUCES SERIOUS RISKS TO YOUR HEALTH.

Wondering about the expense of smoking, I stopped in the Convenience Store on Main Street to ask a few questions.  The most popular brand was Marlboro, priced at $7.66 per pack, $8.20 with tax.   A chain smoker inhaling two packs per day spends $492 per month on cigarettes.  If a two-pack smoker could quit, and instead invest that money into a annuity that guarantee a minimum 5% annual return, after five years, he would have saved up about $33,598 – equivalent to a year of college tuition or a down payment on a house.  He would also have much better health and clean smelling clothes.  If given this other option, I wondered, “Would people still chose smoking?”

On Cliff Street, I picked up a Foxwoods matchbook, imprinted with the slogan: The Wonder of It All.

Upon arriving home, I researched the history of tobacco on the internet and found a wealth of information at www.tobacoo .org, beginning with the following highlights:

1604: King James I writes A Counterblaste to Tobacco: “Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”  And, James I increases the import tax 4,000%.  A similar reaction to today’s restriction of marijuana ensues.  Smugglers sell tobacco right off the ship, and those with the means to pay know where the best stuff was to be secretly had.  Regular repeated use leads to addiction.

1612: John Rolfe, who married the exotic Pocahontas, raises Virginia's first commercial crop of "tall tobacco".

1614: First sale of native Virginia tobacco in England, and King James I makes the import of tobacco a Royal monopoly, available for a yearly fee, as it becomes widely sold.

1619: First Africans brought into Jamestown, Virginia. They were needed for the booming tobacco crop, but had been baptized, and so could not be enslaved for life, but only indentured.

1619: In Berkeley, VA, the very first American Thanksgiving celebrates a good tobacco crop. Not Plymouth, MA, in 1620?  The Thanksgiving holiday was abandoned after the Indian Massacre of 1622.  Chesapeake colonies begin using tobacco as means of currency. Gold and silver had become scarce, and the use of wampum was terminated. 

The desire for tobacco grew in England, and in exchange for providing a seemingly endless supply of raw resources, the colonies were forbidden any production or trade of finished product. As for the effect on government, all laws were made more or less with reference to tobacco: protecting it, and maintaining its value in price, affecting both civil and criminal processes.   

Is compromised health one price we pay for economic growth?
 
The genus Nicotiana tabacum derives its name from Joan Nicot, a Portuguese who introduced the Tobacco plant into France, and from the Haitian word for the pipe in which the herb is smoked.  The most important constituent in tobacco is the alkaloid Nicotine, an inflammable oil with an acrid smell and a burning taste.  After the leaves are smoked, the nicotine decomposes into pyridine, furfurol, collidine, hydrocyanic acid, and carbon-monoxide. The poisonous effects of Tobacco smoke are due to these substances of decomposed nicotine. 
 
Next I googled “Hooded Merganser” - a duck with a flashing white crest that I’d spotted while walking home over the waterfall bridge.  I wanted to see if it had some symbolism.  What popped up was a photo of the bird’s eye and an odd synchronicity of text: “Sagittal section of the eye of a Hooded Merganser stimulated with nicotine sulphate to approximate accommodation.”  Apparently, this was done to demonstrate the bird’s adaptability to the change in pressure when diving below the water.