I used to be a smoker. At the time that I stopped smoking, somewhere around age 28, I was smoking a pack of 20 cigarettes a day. How and why I stopped smoking is another story for another day but once upon a time I used to smoke. There was nothing unusual about that since almost all my friends smoked as well. We smoked at home. We smoked at work, in one another's homes, in our parents' homes, in our friends' parents' homes, in bars, restaurants, movie houses, department stores; on the bus, the plane, the train, in our cars, in our friends' cars - without regard to whoever else was in the vicinity, least of all children. People who didn't smoke, like my mother, placed ash trays strategically in their homes so that their friends who smoked would use an ash tray and not their saucer or empty cup once they had finished their tea. One popular sign in toilets said, "Please do not throw your cigarette ends into the toilet. It makes them soggy and difficult to light." The only place that I can think of where we did not smoke was in church. I remember that some people went out during the sermon so that they could have a smoke.
Thinking back on those times I cringe when I think how selfish I was, I and all my fellow smokers. There actually were people who did not smoke, like my mother. She hated the smell of stale smoke and cigarettes that hung around our house the morning after an evening entertaining friends even more than the smell of the smoky pall while people were actually puffing away. She hated emptying the ashtrays. She particularly hated throwing away soggy cigarette butts that some idiot would put into the dregs of a tea or coffee cup. There was a social presumption that smokers could smoke as they pleased and non-smokers simply had to put up with it and clean up behind them.
Of course we now know that it was far worse than simply being insensitive or even obnoxious. We have now been educated to the hazards of second-hand smoke as a powerful carcinogen and are aware of the dangers to our children and employees as well as to the higher cost of healthcare associated with cancers and breathing and cardiac disorders as a result of smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke. In short, we have come to understand that the cost of smoking is far higher than the mere cost of a pack of smokes at the corner store. That is simply the cost of putting a packet of cigarettes into your pocket. Once you light up and inhale you need to add the increase on your life insurance premiums, the increased burden on taxpayers in a system that has medicare or social health insurance, the loss in productivity from an ailing workforce, the resultant loss of tax revenue; the list goes on and on.
A failure to learn from our mistakes.
What really gets me is the reluctance of society to see that we are repeating all of these mistakes, all this anti-social behaviour, by the cavalier way we "smoke" gasoline with our motor cars and jet planes or "smoke" coal and gas with our power generating plants. We persist in believing that the cost of a liter or gallon of petroleum is what we pay at the pump to fill our cars; that the cost of travelling by plane from Toronto to Chicago is what we have to pay to be issued with a ticket. That is simply the cost of putting gas into your tank, or of putting a ticket in your pocket. Once you turn the engine on, once the plane takes off, a whole extra set of costs comes into play, including hospital emergency room intervention for asthma, heart complaints and other respiratory ailments, not to mention global warming and its social and environmental consequences. Here's the kicker: every individual on the planet has to bear the burden of these extra costs to the environment, including the poorest citizens in the poorest countries of the world who will never in their lifetime have any hope of ever owning a gas guzzling vehicle or flying in a plane.
Here in Ontario there has been a lot of complaining about the recent sharp rise in the cost of gasoline. There have been accusations of gouging by oil companies and refiners. I suspect that is true. There have been calls to scrap the recently introduced Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) so that petrol can remain "affordable". My take on it is that the cost of gasoline is too little. Other than some states in the Middle East, North America still has the cheapest gas in the world - even after the recent sharp hikes in the cost of gas. Here in Canada, Healthcare and, therefore, the tax payer, is picking up the tab for the costs associated with driving cars and flying planes. I don't say that these are the only sources of air pollution which causes health problems, but they are major contributors. In other words, Healthcare tax dollars are being used to subsidize the cost of using gasoline. Isn't there something wrong with this picture? Isn't this reminiscent of where we used to be with smoking cigarettes?
