I Why we can’t ignore the fags of life all over again
HAVE never smoked in my life but I come from a family of committed puffers. I’m talking parents for whom ciggies were a kind of currency cum gift, to be offered around like cups of tea – ‘have a Woodbine! Try an Embassy!’ – whenever there was a social gathering.
When there was, it took only an hour or so for our front room to be wrapped in a yellow fog, the smoke hanging like a Victorian pea-souper, as friends and family inhaled their way through most of a tobacco plantation.
My parents were 20-plus-a-dayers. Any newly magnolia-painted wall of my childhood home stayed magnolia for only a matter of weeks and even the budgie developed a nicotine tinge to his feathers.
My dad, meanwhile, developed a serious heart condition. My mum called ciggies her ‘only vice’. Both carried on until the day they died.
It wasn’t that they didn’t know cigarettes were bad for their health but, like millions before them, had started in an era when smoking was at first actively encouraged and then made out to be ‘not as bad’ as some would have you believe.
As crazy as it sounds, from the 1930s through to the ‘50s, smokers were told that taking lungfuls of nicotine could help with everything from weight management to anxiety. Tobacco companies used doctors to endorse products and even got together to argue that research showing a link between cancer and smoking was alarming but not conclusive.
Smoking also looked very cool.
By the time the terrible reality was out there, it was too late. My parents were addicted and, if truth be told, remained suspicious of the medical evidence, clinging to the tried and tested ‘I knew a man who smoked 60 a day and he lived until he was 90’.
Here in 2019 the smoking landscape is very different. Vaping is everywhere with both smokers and non-smokers using e-cigs – some to try to kick a nicotine habit, others because it looks trendy. It is the go-to method to quit the dreaded weed.
Yet there is concern over the health risks around vaping – particularly in the US, surrounding e-cigs which contain non-approved liquids like cannabis or vitamin E or non standard devices. Seven people have died from vaping-related causes in America and several states have now banned vape flavours outright.
In the UK, the British Lung Foundation says there is ‘no evidence’ that Brits have suffered the same acute reactions to e-cigarettes, arguing regulations surrounding vaping are very different in the two countries.
There is no doubt that vaping IS a lot safer than smoking. But, just like tobacco all those years ago, there needs to be more education about e-cigs, what they can do, how to use them – and what they contain.
We can’t afford to go back to the days when the facts about smoking was lost in a fug of ignorance.