The BBC relates how Scotland just keeps piling on stupid antitobacco laws. It’s the usual drivel about protecting the children (meaning all citizens in the eyes of today’s narcissistic legislators) from the very sight or thought of anything related to tobacco. We focus, however, on the BBC article’s closing quote from Scottish Doctor Andrew Buist: “Tackling children’s addiction to tobacco is rightly a top priority for this government. A lifetime addicted to tobacco is a death sentence.”
Well, once again, those of us out of high school are not children, and by the way, those of us who choose to smoke can get along bloody well fine without intrusive government. We have been doing so for a long time. Click here to review the “lifetime death sentences” of some long-term devoted smokers who have passed away, pictured with longevity noted, presented as a gallery. You should do so well. We could have listed hundreds of our own acquaintances just as you could do. Let the score of famous faces in our gallery suffice to make the point. Everybody dies. Smokers die of the same things everybody dies of and smokers do not typically live short lives.
If you’re average you can expect to die in your seventies. That’s a plain fact. You can expect most likely to die of something akin to what those in our gallery died of. There is no death unique to smokers and the causes of death amongst these twenty have no particular relation to smoking. For example, Bette Davis died of breast cancer, Albert Einstein from an aortic aneurysm, Jackie Gleason from colon cancer, Alfred Hitchcock from kidney failure, Harold MacMillan from pneumonia, Laurence Olivier from muscular myopathy, and Kurt Vonnegut from complications after taking a fall.
All the rest simply died of old age when their hearts stopped. They all died in their seventies or beyond. This group of smokers includes Jeanne Calment, who smoked cigarettes regularly for more than one hundred years, dying in 1997 at age 122: the greatest documented attainment in years by any human being in all history. Smoke, or don’t, one will get you billions you ain’t gonna do no better than that. Remember too: the odds are greatly against getting lung cancer, whether you ever smoked or never did, and those who do die of lung cancer die on average in their seventies, the same as do humans in general in the West.
If you run into Andrew Buist please be sure to blow smoke in his face. Then tell him you want the lifetime death sentence Jeanne Calment got saddled with but don’t wish him the same.
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