CURMUDGEON'S CORNER

Well, it's that time again: time for my annual diatribe against student smoking. I could just repeat last year's arguments. It's not as if anything has changed. We've still got hundreds of supposedly intelligent students clinging to that pathetic pubescent fantasy that smoking makes one appear "grown-up" and "cool". Yeah, and I've got this neat suspension bridge for sale... Ask any real adult, and they'll tell you that the grown-up thing to do is spend the rest of your life wishing you never took up the filthy habit. We've still got supposedly committed environmentalists who, through some bizarre form of contorted moral gymnastics, don't see smoke producing and butt dropping as pollution. What are we to think about people whose hearts bleed over shampoo in the eyes of laboratory dogs, but have no problem at all with subjecting their fellow human beings to second-hand carcinogens...? And we've still got allegedly hip consumers who can't get it through their granite crania that this is the only substance sold on this planet that, when used exactly as the manufacturer intends, kills its user. (Even crack and heroin have to be abused to kill.)

But I'm not going to mention all that. Because I've come across a stunning statistic. Did you know that smoking is twice as dangerous as Russian roulette...??? The math ain't hard. US Dept. of Health statistics show that smokers have a one-in-three chance of dying prematurely from cancer or emphysema. The chances of dying playing Russian roulette are only one-in-six. And even that is just the tip of the Titanic-sinker.

Let's compare all aspects of both forms of self-destruction:

Death from a bullet to the brain is quick, and the pain lasts but a fraction of a second; death from cancer or emphysema can take years - or even decades - of constant agony as your body eats itself alive. Lose at Russian roulette and the only people who'll be affected will probably be your family and a few buds (and the janitor who has to clean the wall); lose at tobacco roulette, and by the time you cash your chips your moronic decision will impact on the lives of your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your children, your co-workers, and what would (hopefully) be a much larger coterie of friends. Lose at Russian roulette, and your family ponies up for a quickie closed-casket funeral; lose at tobacco roulette, and after the years of horrendous medical bills your spouse and kids end up living in an old refrigerator box in a garbage-strewn vacant lot. One 38 caliber bullet costs about a quarter; by the time tobacco puts your lights out, you'll have spent enough on butts to buy a car! It doesn't take a genius to see that Russian roulette would be the preferable gamble even if the odds were the same as with tobacco. But they're better...!!! If someone asked you if you wanted to play Russian roulette, you'd think he was a raving lunatic. And smoking is twice as dangerous!

Look. Tobacco kills more Americans every couple of years than every war America has fought since 1775 combined. The tobacco companies have to recruit tens of thousands of fools each year just to replace the market share that their products killed the year before. Nobody disputes either of these statistics. So what sort of idiot ignores them?

I have a suggestion. Instead of smoking, why don't you just have the word "Moron" tattooed on your forehead? You'd get pretty much the same level of social opprobrium your smoking generates now - and it wouldn't fuck with OUR health. (Getting into and out of Mudd, King, Wilder and Stevenson without a gas mask involves breathing the atmospheric equivalent of toxic waste.) The only drawback to that is that we'll have to put up with your sorry asses for another 40 or 50 years, instead of another 20 or 30.

-Mary Margaret Towey