Smoking is dangerous to your health

At my funeral my rabbi has been given strict instructions to throw a last carton of Camel Filters and a Zippo lighter into the casket with me just in case, heaven forbid, I wake up six feet under only to find myself without a smoke. Knowing my form I won’t be able to find them in the dark and I’ll land up spending hours and hours scratching around the box and calling that rabbi every name under the sun.

Anyhow! The reason I mention this is that I have just finished reading the column of a certain Ms Georgina Guedes entitled “Smokin’ hot topic” in which she expresses her views about the somewhat heated reaction she received to a previous column that she had written about smoking. Needless to say many of you lot were merciless and when you read her article, which is included here, don’t forget to check out the comments’ section.

www.news24.com/News24/Columnists/Georgina_Guedes/0,,2-1630-2022_2384189,00.html

My problem with the response to Georgina is that most of the smokers seemed to feel that the best form of defence is to point out other areas which are, in their opinion, just as, if not more, dangerous than smoking but seem to attract very little attention. Along the lines of: if you think smoking is so bad how about alcohol which occasions abuse, motor vehicle accidents and illness but nobody says anything about that?

Her response, which is 100% correct, is that one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. If you have a ‘saak’ with alcohol and its allied problems then by all means raise them in the appropriate forum but don’t bring them into the smoking debate. The same applies to any other issues the public finds more dangerous than lighting up.

The debate is and has to be focused on the right to smoke full stop.

My point of departure is that I am a smoker. The nanny state is telling me where and when I can smoke and if I don’t obey the rules that I can be charged and even convicted of smoking in areas designated as non-smoking. In effect that they have basically excluded me from every public building in the country, as long as I am smoking a cigarette.

Worse, they plan to include all public areas in the prohibition, tighten up on advertising and put horror pictures on the outside of the cigarette packets.

Now I consider myself a dedicated smoker. I’ve even donated some of the years I would have been spending at the Shady Pines Retirement Home, drooling soup out of the corner of my mouth and playing the part of the vegetable in the yearly pantomime, in order to win Springbok colours for smoking (ask my doctor). In addition, I am well aware of the health risks and certainly don’t encourage others to smoke.

Up until now I have respected the rights of non-smokers in terms of smoking where I am allowed to and not sneaking a couple in, in the prohibited spots. Should the Nazis bring in their proposed new laws and further limit my freedoms I will respect those boundaries too.

However, from this day forward I plan to implement one change to my response to the paragons of virtue club. Instead of allowing ex-smokers and non-smokers to waffle crap at me about the joys of non-smoking for hour after hour I’m going to start giving them something to take home with them. As a specialised criminal attorney I often get to hear about all the horror stories going on in and around South Africa.

Be warned: while you are telling me that smoking causes cancer I’ll be telling you that I have heard that there is a serial killer loose in your area and that the terrible thing is that the reason why they can’t catch him is because they think it’s actually four different killers. That the police would investigate but they’re too terrified to go into your area. In fact it’s gotten so bad they’ve actually given up on your area but will never admit to it publicly. Not to worry, as soon as the killers believe they are running out of potential victims they’ll move on. Shouldn’t be long, I mean how long can one suburb sustain 12 murders a week?

Then while you’re lying awake at night with your gun on your pillow and the kids locked in their rooms, you can think of all the wonderful stop smoking stories you can tell everyone.

Just make sure it’s not near me.