I don't think I'm inside my own mind today...
There was a time where Smoking wasn't so taboo, if it's hard to believe. I'm not from this age, although my father might remember such a time. Smoking was anything except bad, the image that it produced was golden. People just looked bad ass smoking a cigarette and everyone knew it. Everywhere you looked, smoking was advertised, it was in movies, on the television. It was pretty much widely accepted everywhere.
Then, the cat was let out of the bag, cigarettes cause cancer? Fuck! Beyond the fact that the fucking things were always addicting (and even more so now) they cause cancer? Well... shit.
All of a sudden, the 90's hit and it's illegal (In Canada anyway) for Cigarettes to advertise in any way. Tobacco advertisements are taken off television, sporting events have suddenly found themselves out of a huge sponsor (Cigarettes used promoted on everything) and have to find relatable other products to pimp their shit. (Yeah, my points are awesome when I use the words 'pimp' and 'shit' in the same sentence)
That wasn't good enough for Health Canada though. Now people needed to be reminded even more than they already were that Cigarettes are in fact bad. They start sticking these ridiculous warning labels on the cigarette. A destroyed heart, nasty ass teeth from mouth cancer, the fact that cigarettes lead to erectile dysfunction, if you smoke your kids will want to too, lung tissue raped by lung cancer. Scathing images accompany breif blurbs that remind the smoker their habit is bad! But no, that wasn't good enough either.
So you gotta start banning smoking in public places. Okay, that's reasonable, not everyone smokes and as society began a huge 'health' trend in the wake of all of this, smokers inevitably got the shaft. There's no smoking in bars, no smoking in restaurants, no smoking anywhere that somebody else could be harmed by the nasty second hand smoke! Apparently the vast majority of people want to live as long as they can. This just got worse. It's now illegal to smoke in front of public entrances. You must be at least 10 feet away from a public entrance if you're going to light up in the province of British Columbia. In the Northwest Territories you aren't even allowed to smoke cigarettes on your own property, only inside. Damn, talk about cleaning house.
The Anti-Smoking shock waves continued to ripple, as of June first, it was illegal to have tobacco products displayed in any fashion. The driving thought is that, if the children can't see the cigarettes that they won't want to buy them. Smokers were stunned. I work in a convenience store and the number of smokers who just assumed we stopped selling them because they couldn't see them. I almost thought that Health Canada might have come up with a good idea at the expense of the stress levels of retailers everywhere.
My co-worker tells me that they (Health Canada) want to make the shelves we use to house the tobacco in the stores illegal. Their reasoning: Because knowing the smokes are sitting there tempts smokers into buying them...
Temps them? THEY CAN'T FUCKING SEE THE CIGARETTES ANYWAY!
In my breif experience, It's usually the things that we can't have that we want the most. Why the fuck are they having the retailers jump through these fucking hoops? If smoking is so bad that they've pretty much made smoking more intolerant that pornography than I think it might not be a bad idea to just stop selling cigarettes all together. In Canada we have quarantined liquor stores, you won't find any twelve packs sitting in the coolers of 7-eleven. Why don't they do the same for cigarettes, make provincially regulated tobacco stores. They're not going to stop selling them because they tax the shit out of them to make ass loads of cash off of the smokes to begin with.
I smoke, and I don't like it but the bastards are as addicting as they say. If they stopped selling them all together I wouldn't be heart broken, I'd get over it and so would the rest of the smokers, I hope. I wish we could reach a modicum of common sense, find some kind of middle ground. We have to hide the cigarettes and everything but we can leave the weed busters and cigarette cases out to display? Health Canada needs to get its shit in order, like maybe maintaining a health care system that's quickly hitting the proverbial shitter, I guess they've got bigger things to worry about. Between The Parliament and The RCMP I've got enough of a lack of faith in the powers that be without having to worry about the people who regulate what's acceptable as far as standards of living is concerned. I guess I could be like everyone else and stop giving a fuck?
In the mean time, light em' up while you still can
Peace!
No comments:
Post a Comment