CIGARETTE TAX?…YOU BET'CHA! $4 A PACKby Molly Regan
Month after month I have put off writing about smoking. It is one of the most difficult addictions to stop. I know. I smoked off and on for 20 years. Most of the adults around me when I was a child smoked including my dad. He stopped when he was 42 after his first heart attack.
Not many people in the 50's and 60's said too much about the awful habit-forming, then socially-accepted practice of lighting up. Most of my cousins smoked cigarettes. (On one side alone I have over 50 cousins.) When we would ride together chumming around, those who didn't smoke just became part of those who put up with the nasty second hand stuff. At least for a while.
My cousin Susan, who was a surgical nurse and former smoker, was probably the first of the cousins to stop. She was in her 20's at the time, so it was sometime in the 70's. I remember her telling us how if we continued to smoke we wouldn't have pink lungs. It took me a long time to get that through my head.
Now, PINK IS IN, AT LEAST FOR LUNGS. Susan's 7 siblings all had taken up the habit also, but since have all stopped. Their father, too, had the nicotine lifestyle. But when Uncle Neal quit, I was amazed. He had smoked for nearly 40 years, starting before joining the Navy in the Pacific in WW II. Why not? After all they were only 10 or 20 cents a pack. So Uncle Neal became my role model to quit. It still took me another 4 or 5 tries, but I finally succeeded. Uncle Neal is still with us and is probably playing euchre somewhere right now.
But that brings me to the reason I decided to write about this now. One of my relatives went into the hospital in mid-December for pneumonia. At least that is what she was first told. She had not been eating for weeks and hadn't said too much about it. While she was being treated, several tests and X-rays were done. It was CANCER. It was found in her chest. It had attached to her spine. It was found in her left hip. It was found in her brain. She had smoked for 50 years. If she hadn't come in to the hospital when she did, her oncologist (cancer doctor) said she might have only lived 6 weeks or so. She decided to start chemotherapy.
Chemo robs the body of health while the cancer tries to decay everything in its path. Unimaginable sickness. No strength. No dignity. My aunt spent 2 months in a hospital. She is now in a nursing home and has received the 3rd in a series of 4-6 possible rounds of chemo. I don't know if she will ever be able to go back into her own home. I am not sure she has come to grips with the possibility of that. She is only 72.
Auntie no longer has pink lungs. They are charred. She can only breathe with the use of an oxygen tank.
PLEASE DON'T SMOKE. DON'T SMOKE AROUND CHILDREN. TELL CHILDREN HOW BAD IT IS FOR YOU.
And please tell your IOWA STATE SENATORS AND HOUSE REPRESENTATIVES TO RAISE THE CIGARETTE TAX. RAISE IT TO $ 4 A PACK. To contact them, see http://www4.legis.state.ia.us/find-leg/. Then maybe nobody will buy them. Maybe our medical costs will go down. Maybe insurance rates can come down. And maybe Auntie could have lived to be 90.
CPR: Conserve/Participate/Recycle and DON'T SMOKE
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