Light 'em if You've Got 'em

 Now there’s a headline we never expected to see: ‘Tobacco firm Philip Morris calls for ban on cigarettes within decade’.

That’s the Marlboro people talking! When big-business, the government and the charities all agree on something, then there will be some changes coming.

There’ll come a time when the only agency that wants people to continue to smoke will be the tax-people. In Spain, 77% of a smoke ends up in taxes, that’s 9,000 million euros – or 4% of all tax-revenue in Spain. 43,000 people work in the sector – planting, rolling or selling them. In Spain, around 22% of adults are daily-smokers while another 25% claim to be ex-smokers says the WHO (May 31 2021).

We used to smoke in restaurants, in hospitals, in the airplane, in the cinema, in the lift, after sex and before breakfast. For a long while there, smoking was considered attractive (or manly), for which we can thank Madison Avenue and its equivalents elsewhere. In those days, cool and groovy people smoked, as the doctors looked on approvingly.

It was certainly a fun and daring thing to do at school (behind the lavatories).

Nowadays, we must not smoke in our car or on the beach. There’s now a designated place some five metres outside the front door of an office where people huddle, in all weather, for a fag. It must surely becoming ever-more clear to them that this is no longer a pleasurable pause, but an uncomfortable addiction, to say nothing of their promotion chances.

Eventually we smokers became short of breath and our clothes smelled. We gave up, or in some – many – cases, it gave us up. Joe Camel stopped being cool. He became a killer.

And yet…

Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t drive fast, don’t say this, don’t do that.

In the future, as we behave ourselves more and more, keeping within the narrow bounds of the limits set by society, we will probably live longer, only to finally expire of boredom in front of our tellies.