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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (14801)	1/4/1998 11:10:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Holly, Richard Brautigan we can agree upon, and I had all but forgotten him as well until I saw that poem. The auto emissions stuff, and government regulation in general, is harder. I think it is generally better to try to do something positive, even though there will be mistakes along the way. MTBE, or whatever it is called, the gasoline additive, would be an example of a big mistake. And if you're subject to a regulation that has passed from our collective memory and mostly affects you and a few other unfortunates, I would write to my representative!!! It seems very unfair. I can only say once more that the patch is worth trying if you really want to quit smoking. Quitting is extremely hard, and people need all the help they can get. I think the California bar and club law needs the kinks worked out, but I doubt seriously that it will be repealed. Only 21% of California adults still smoke, and they are not a huge, powerful political force. I don't go in bars because I cannot stand cigarette smoke, and I know lots of people like me. So I think the bar owners will be pleasantly surprised once everyone gets used to the law, to see new faces in their bars. And owner-operated bars can still allow smoking. The law is a workplace safety law, not the slippery slope towards loss of most personal freedoms. Speaking idealistically, however, it is exciting to think of a generation growing up without very many of their parents smoking, with no smoking advertisements or appealing characters to hook children at all, no vending machines and rigorously enforced laws precluding grocers from selling cigarettes to minors. From a public health standpoint, we need to stop teenagers from starting to smoke, and isolating smokers certainly cannot make smoking more appealing to these children. It is not "cool" to have to stand on a cold, rainy street to smoke, or in a totally smoke filled isolation booth. I don't think anyone would really smoke if they could quit, and a lot of the constitutional defenses smokers use I suspect have a lot of rationalization built into them. I know this because I started thinking that way a tiny bit when I smoked briefly last year. It is not glamourous to feel like a pariah. Just as it is unfair for doctors to assume that all of a patient's health problems are due to smoking, it is irrefutable that cigarette smoking is life-shortening, and leads to several chronic disease conditions. Second-hand smoke definitely does kill, and the statistics about the thousands of non-smoking spouses of smokers who die every year of second hand smoke-related diseases bears that out. Did you see the brand new anti-smoking ad campaign, where a tiny camera records the smoke going down the throat on the inside of the body, and into the lungs? I thought it was very effective. But it doesn't seem fair to show stuff like that unless there are a LOT of programs offered to help smokers quit. Isn't there a new drug that is supposed to help take the cravings away? Is it on the market yet, and do you know if it works?