I am not a cigarette smoker and I am certainly proud to say it.
In an Oct. 4 article, Mr. Andrew Chapin (’09) jokes that it’s a good thing adolescent girls have turned to cigarettes to lose weight rather than speed or coke. Cigarettes kill 400,000 people a year in the United States and cost more than $167 billion in annual health related costs. Cocaine and speed combined kill approximately 200,000.
Please, let’s not heap the tragedy of underage cigarette use on top of the tragedy of image enhancement issues facing impressionable young women. Especially since, if cigarette smoking and eating disorders haven’t already killed them, a good number of these impressionable young women become impressionable young college students.
Monitoring one’s weight certainly is an individual responsibility. However, it is also a responsibility shared with the rest of society.
Popular culture, ads, models, movie stars and rock stars who continue to reinforce the image that super thin is sexy and that anyone who isn’t is a castaway are certainly a more accurate reason young girls have eating disorders than studies like the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
If you don’t agree, just ask yourself how many young impressionable girls you’ve seen reading copies of the study.
While smoking has decreased in popularity at Fairfield, a visit to the local hospital’s cancer ward or even the local cemetery just a few miles away from Jogues Hall and the 13-block at the townhouses will certainly make one wish cigarette smoking was dead.
Mr. Chapin argues that smoking is the great equalizer, separating the men from the boys and the women from the Fairfield girls. I completely agree.
Smoking separates the men from the boys by putting the men on oxygen tanks or six feet under. And smoking separates the women from the Fairfield girls by forever making those girls wonder how their lives would have been different if Mom hadn’t died from lung cancer.
When I asked a few Fairfield lung cancer patients if curing boredom, living once, enjoying a cig after a nice meal or was worth losing loved ones, poisoning the air with second hand smoke and getting cancer themselves, they all said no, it wasn’t. That is, the ones who could speak.
Yes, you have the right to your habits. You have the right to not take care of yourself by divorcing yourself from the gym, amicably or not. By all means, enjoy your man breasts and your six dollars per pack per day habit. Enjoy the dance.
Just keep in mind the $3.45 in medical care due to smoking and the $3.75 in productivity losses that cost our society per pack as a result.
Smoking is your choice, but not having to foot the bill for the medical costs that will certainly result from your habit and not having to risk my own health at the same time is mine. And don’t tell me otherwise because last time I checked, it’s my decision and it always has been.
Sincerely, Megan Steele ’08, president of Colleges Against Cancer
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