Parent Connection: Smoking Article...

A friend and colleague of mine Walt Mueller recently wrote an interesting blog article on smoking, worth checking out. I'll start it here, but you can finish it on his blog....

My First Cigarette. . . .

A news story this week caught my eye and jogged my memory. The story was about a new trend that has parents and health officials concerned. It seems that a growing number of children and tweens are "smoking," of all things, Smarties. Not only that, but they're posting their Smartie-smoking videos on YouTube. They crush them up in the cellophane roll, open both ends, inhale the crushed sugar into their mouths, and then blow out sugary Smartie smoke.

Ahh, kids these days. . . . oh. . . . wait a minute. . . what about kids in those days????

All this talk about Smartie-smoking took me back to my childhood fascination with smoking. You need to know that I grew up in a home where nobody smoked. No cigarettes, no cigars, no pipes. Nothing. However, I grew up in a neighborhood where plenty of my friends' parents smoked, and they smoked all of those things.

Lucky me. I had a bit of a childhood fascination with the smell of cigarette smoke. Yep, I was one of those weird kids who liked the smell. . . sort of like the smells I liked when we pulled into the gas station and my dad would roll down his window to tell the attendant to "fill 'er up with regular." Come on. . . I know I'm not alone in this. I also remember the smell of cigars. . . mostly the smell of collective cigars as that smoke mixed with the odor of watered down beer in the stands at Connie Mack Stadium. I still think about baseball when I smell a cigar. And then there were the pipes. I had a few friends whose dads had pipestands on tables next to their favorite chair. They also had those ashtrays that sat on floor pedastals next to their chairs. I remember sticking my nose into those pipe's bowls to grab a sniff of scented tobacco. I also remember a couple of neighbhorhood dads who would walk behind the lawn-mower with a pipe clenched between their teeth. It looked kind of like a steam-engine puffing through the backyard.

Not only did we have real-life flesh-and-blood examples showing us how to smoke everywhere we turned, but the world of marketing did a good number on us. Back then we didn't know as much about the dangers of cigarettes. Smoking was presented to those of us who were Christian kids as a moral risk (yes, there will be lots of smoking in Hell! Can you say "sin sticks?"), not the health risk we know it as today. On the other hand, smoking was presented by marketers as manly, adult, and even the sexy thing to do. Liberated women smoked and they even had their own brand. . . Virginia Slims. Marketers knew back then that to grow the cigarette business, they had to cultivate new smokers. Even the Flintstones - a cartoon I loved and watched faithfully - marketed cigarettes to kids like me. More recently, there was Joe Camel. I've heard lots of statistics over the years regarding kids and smoking. The tobacco companies know that 80% of adult smokers started before they were 18. And, the tobacco companies know that they have to develop thousands of new smokers a day to replace those who either die off or quit. So, it makes sense to go after impressionable young kids.