When I was a young child, every adult that lived in my household smoked cigarettes.

I distinctly remember being bullied, and made fun of, because my clothes smelled like cigarette smoke no matter how thoroughly they were washed. Peers of mine that I wanted to be friends with were actually told by their parents that they were not allowed to play with me, or befriend me, because of how… thoroughly I smelled like cigarette smoke. They made sure to let me know this. I knew that I smelled like cigarette smoke because I could smell it on my clothes even after they had been washed. This continued to persist well into high school, although I did manage to make some friends who would associate with me during lunch and while we were on campus together. (I think by that point, people just assumed that I was the one smoking and that was why I smelled like cigarette smoke, rather than the smell being secondhand as a result of the adults that I was living with smoking in the house. I didn’t realize that, or even think about it, until well after I had graduated high school, but it would not surprise me if a large swath of the student body had just begun to assume that I was the one smoking at that point or speculated that I had just picked up the habit myself.)

One of the memories that stands out in my mind was me, as a young child, asking my mother — who was one of the household members that smoked the most — if she would “stop smoking so (that) I could have friends”. It pains me to think about that, let alone the fact that as a young child I felt like I had to ask her this one small thing, something that was, comparatively speaking, reasonable. It wasn’t as though I was asking her for extravagant material possessions. I was just asking her if she would stop smoking so that I could stop going to school smelling like cigarette smoke. Unsurprisingly, her response to me was to refuse, and then to tell me that she too was bullied at school, and to try to console me about being bullied… when she could have helped mitigate the fact I was being bullied, and that students were being told by their parents not to associate with me or to be my friend, because my clothes reeked of the stench of cigarette smoke.

My mother was diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor at the age of fifty-nine stemming from lung cancer, likely brought about from decades of smoking. She died at the age of sixty, a year out from initial diagnosis.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/27/health/us-tobacco-age-21-trnd/index.html

For those of you who don’t already know, the federal “smoking age” was raised to twenty-one years of age in the United States in December. To be able to buy any product containing tobacco (or to legally be able to use it), you need to be twenty-one years of age, which is a deviation from the prior age of eighteen. This is a change that I welcome, although I wish that cigarettes would not be sold at all due to the fact that they are a known carcinogen and contribute greatly to the incidences of lung cancer that we see, particularly in later life. As I’ve said in previous posts, if people insist on wanting to… consume, or imbibe, nicotine, there have to be safer ways to bring it into their bodies than smoking cigarettes given the comparatively astronomically high rates of lung cancer that occur as an almost direct result of years, or even decades, worth of smoking.

Humorously, given my experience with smokers, I have never thought that marijuana has been the “gateway drug”. In individuals who have been susceptible to it, I have thought that cigarettes have been. But I understand the pathophysiology behind addiction better than at least many other people out there, and I’ve seen how addictive nicotine can be and has been in at least three people that I have known in person so far.

Although this might put addicted smokers in a bind who are over the age of eighteen but under the age of twenty-one given that they will no longer legally be allowed to smoke, I see this change in law being nothing but for the best(, as do I look forward to a day when cigarettes are no longer manufactured to begin with).

Given my family’s… history of having smokers in it, some people are surprised by the fact that I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life, at least until they find out how severe my asthma is. Some of them are still surprised that I haven’t “managed to find a way to smoke”, as though nicotine is this powerful of a drug. Having no prior history with it, having never smoked in my life, I can’t say either way. And I never intend to have history with it, having seen my own grandmother and mother smoke to the point that they came down with lung cancer, then metastatic lung cancer, then die as a result of it. Some people may think that I’m being a bit blunt saying that, but it is what it is — my mother cared for her own mother, who died from lung cancer, did not stop smoking, came down with metastatic lung cancer herself, did not seem to mind that smoking had heavily contributed to this, and died not seeming to mind. I fully intend on breaking this cycle.

To be honest, I’ve never understood the allure behind something that is a known carcinogen and life shortener. With things like caffeine, there isn’t the drastically increased risk of cancer — there isn’t the surgeon general’s warning, the black box label. There’s only the admonishment that children shouldn’t be drinking it, and the advisement that you should only consume so much of it in a twenty-four hour period (as well as the fact that children should not be drinking energy drinks, which I wholeheartedly agree with, as well as guidance on the consumption of energy drinks within a twenty-four hour period… and as an adult who doesn’t mind the occasional energy drink due to their taste, that is also something else that I actually agree on). If something is a known carcinogen and will shorten my life by my repeated consumption of it, that’s not something that I am even willing to start putting in my body, especially when the risk of cancer drastically increases with use over time, as we’ve seen with cigarettes. And I have family history on my side.

And as I’ve mentioned in here, I’ve also got the “gift” of shoddy lung function, which would not help matters out at all. Knowing my luck, I would develop cancer even sooner, worsen my lung function even quicker, and be even worse the wear for it… and who would that effect? My children. Regardless of their ages, that would affect my children. And I know this now. Why would I even bother doing this to myself if I know all this now?

Maybe I’m a bit naïve (which I would rather happily be), but is nicotine really worth all of this?

Are cigarettes worth coming down with cancer and shortening one’s life by years, maybe even decades?

Are they really?

Quite frankly, I’m aghast that another popular way of delivering nicotine still hasn’t managed to be marketed given that lung cancer is a leading cause of death. The least we can do is find a safer way to imbibe nicotine.

And given what has been on the news about vaping, so far it’s not really the safest alternative.

For the better part of December, I had to screw around with PayPal not wanting to charge the intended funding source for a purchase that I had wanted to make, then attempting to do unauthorized funds transfers on various other funding sources of mine. It was only at the end of December that I was able to amicably “resolve” this in that I was finally able to delete my eBay and PayPal accounts, which was what I decided that I wanted to do after PayPal decided that their repeated attempts to do these unauthorized funds transfers were allegedly “authorized”… rather than attempting to use the funding source that I had wanted them to use in the first place, doubling down on their faulty logic because it padded their bottom line. Over the course of December, Google searches revealed a similar line of logic in that PayPal sided with whoever stood to make them more money in claims and disputes like this, and it was around then that I decided that I wanted as little to do with them or any site that they were owned by as humanly possible.

I think that if I do make another PayPal account, it’s only going to be connected to the bank accounts that are connected to the kids’ ABLE accounts since those can not have funds transfers done on them and the money in those can only be used for very specific purposes. But that is probably not something that I’m going to do right now, although it is something that I will consider on down the line since the money in their ABLE accounts is something that I would like to spend on their behalf at some point. Obviously it’s not something that I would like to spend right now. I would like to spend it on bigger expenses for them later.