This Is My Brain on Tobacco

When we were kids, we sat around on Saturdays, eating our cinnamon rolls from a tin and watching cartoons like Conjunction Junction. Now there’s an acoustic memory!

But while we were learning how to hook clauses together, some very evil people were plotting to hook us on cigarettes. Some good guys tried to save us with a few songs. I’ll never forget the jingle: “You mind very much if they smoke—yeah, yeah, don’t smoke.”

My generation knew of the carcinogenicity of cigarettes because starting in 1984, four labels were penned to let the Surgeon General warn us about smoking on our packs of cigarettes. This was twenty years after the Surgeon General issued a 387-page report on the health risks that attend smoking.

But how were we supposed to stay off the sticks with the clever ad campaigns and the tobacco companies’ use of nicotine to addict smokers?

We now know that the tobacco fields were the killing fields and that the rugged ad cowboy with the cigarette was more likely to ride a wheelchair than a horse. Much has been done in the fight against the tobacco industry, but have we really come a long way?

How is it possible that the tobacco companies can continue to manipulate the nicotine in cigarettes to addict smokers?

Now, I’m sure you know that the chemicals in cigarettes and smokeless tobacco cause cancer; nicotine addicts you to them.

What if happybabyo’s cereal switched to a sugar that was more addicting but was known to cause childhood leukemia? And what if there were a warning label that even said so on the box? WWFDAD? What would the FDA do? Would it even matter? Who would buy the product?

The FDA has let us down. At least the Supreme Court is getting its act together.

Gather round little children and Aunt Heather will tell you a story. Native Americans smoked. The Jamestown settlers grew tobacco for cash and this increased the need for slave trade. In 1865 a prominent Carolina family named Duke founded the American Tobacco Company. And it was pretty much downhill from there. Of all the dirty deeds done, one of the more heinous is the racial profiling of consumers. They increased levels of tar in cigarette brands marketed to African Americans.

When I pick up my daughter from high school, there’s a group of her classmates just across the property line at the town bus stop, and they are smoking cigarettes. Who is looking out for them? I’m trying. Last year I gave four tobacco ed lectures at that school. I can’t tell you how many “word up”’s those kids gave me. While it was much more fun to visit schools than it was to sit in my office and diagnose lung cancer, it’s disheartening to see those kids still smoking. But look what I’m up against: It takes four cigarettes to addict a teenager’s brain to nicotine.

Imagine there’s no smoking. It’s not easy to do. How are we going to get there?

We can educate our children. Thanks to Troy Campbell for agreeing to work with me on a cartoon infomercial for kids (we need some more brains on tobacco to help us with the project, by the way). We can provide assistance to folks trying to quit. If you live in the Chapel Hill area, Dr. Adam Goldstein says that his clinic at UNC offers help to smokers “regardless of their financial ability.” But until we stop making the products available, in their addictive form, the work has just begun.

When I was a student, I worked as a temp at the corporate headquarters of a tobacco company. I actually typed an in-house document that said, in response to the findings that substances X and Y have been found to be dangerous [did it say carcinogenic--doesn't matter], we will continue to use them in our products. And how could they have been so brazen as to let an outsider have access to such a damning document?

So let me say this again, much has been done in the fight against the tobacco industry, but have we really come a long way?

My friend Jocelyn Godfrey is the editor of Attitude Digest and she interviewed Maya Angelou this morning. The word on Joce’s Facebook page is that Maya says protest, don’t whine. Forgive me Maya, I’m posting a 12-step plan with some undercurrents of whining. But I’m not really whining--I’m fuming!

Before I turn my list over to you, why don’t you get good and mad, too? If you’re down with Obama’s plans for change, check out this website and then scroll to the bottom of the page and see who's funding it.

How about we dance the 12-step?

1. Quit treating corporate America like God. From the Enrons to the Peanut Corporation of America to the tobacco industry—how many times have we seen it play out—corporate America doesn’t always take the consumer’s best interest into account. Let’s not put their best interest first when we use our brains on the tobacco issue.

2. All US production of cigarette, dip, etc. etc, must cease by the year 2012.

3. Because I don’t think we have the chutzpah to carry out #2, how about, smokers, after the year 2020, pay a higher income tax. This gives smokers eight years of incentive to quit.

4. Cigarette corporations will fund all nicotine-containing smoking cessation products and the advertising for them.

5. Homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages will sue the tobacco companies for their money back. A 40-year-old woman who smoked a pack a day would get back enough to pay off a house.

6. Executive pay for cigarette companies will be limited to three colonoscopies a year.

7. State medical boards will set up task forces to assess their states' tobacco problem and to make recommendations more serious than the ones proposed in this list. Look at the impact of the North Carolina medical board on capital punishment.

8. Increase the cigarette tax. In North Carolina I pay 48.6 cents per gallon for gasoline; the tax on a pack of cigarettes in my state is 35 cents.

9. School systems that do not mandate tobacco-free campuses will receive fewer federal dollars for education.

10. The Motion Picture Association of America will rate all movies with smoking "X."

11. Jim Lehrer will take a moment of silence at the end of the Newshour each night for the cigarette smokers that died from cigarette-induced illness that day. Wait, that will take more than an hour.

12. We shall work tirelessly until we overcome. If we couldn’t do it for ourselves, let’s do it for our kids.

Yes, I know I’m fuming, but this is the “toned down” version of today’s blog.