Smoking..... weekly issue 3

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I am hard pressed to buy into all of this 'smoking kills' propaganda. My extensive family tree (When we start throwing aunts, uncles, cousins) has lots of smokers who lived a very, very long time without heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, and the like.

I'm not that skeptical, though it wouldn't surprise me if some people have a much greater tolerance to it than others (and interesting question to me: how much does believing smoking is healthy or unhealthy affect the body?), and I think it's plausible to consider that many smokers claim to live stressful lives and maybe the stress is taking a toll as well. And I figure there are countless ways we risk our health, smoking is just one more way.

But I do recall when I saw a pic of the oldest woman on record, being over a 150 IIRC, and in the pic they'd taken of her she was holding a lit Marlboro. :o

And I recall laughing out loud at a McD's drive through window because the much older guy I was with was smoking (he just can't seem to remember that smoking is much less acceptable today as when he was young) and the lady in the window flashed the No Smoking sign at him. I was so surprised because I figured anyone working at McDonald's (who breathe in a lot of combustion as well as monoxide and are encouraged to eat their food) isn't someone who cares about their health and I laughed. And unfortunately for me his cigarette smoke was staying in the truck with us rather than (unlike his truck's exhaust) going into the lady's lungs.

My sampling of the population tells me that while smoking is an expensive, and dirty habit (smoke ruins everything) it isn't the killer it is reputed to be.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea why smoking got such a bad rep it didn't deserve? :confused: