Why are celebs glamorising smoking again? That question was part of the headline in a recent story on BBC.com about how some unthinking and selfish celebrities are once again promoting the dirtiest, smelliest, unhealthiest, intelligence-lowering, and ugliest habit in history: smoking. The article notes that “even in low quantities, smoking increases the risk of serious diseases like lung cancer, which has a 90% five-year mortality rate.” Despite everyone — including smokers — knowing this, the article adds,
…singers, actors and influencers seem to be bringing smoking back into vogue – quite literally, with cigarettes making a return as on the New York Fashion Week runways earlier this year as accessories.
Rich celebrities have access to much better health and body care than the average smoker, so they can afford to be brazen and cavalier about the risks and results of smoking. They can afford maids and cleaning staff to rid their homes of the sickening stench of stale tobacco, to wash the yellow stains off their walls. They can afford to buy ultra-filtered water, and not risk the tobacco-polluted tap water. They can afford the botox treatments and cosmetic surgery to rid them of the deep lines smoking etches into your face. They can afford the high-end products that plaster over those dermal crevices to make them appear young. They have expensive doctors who can find lung and kidney replacements for those organs damaged by smoking. They can afford the best palliative care when the cancer eats away at them.
Smokers, celebrities included, are inexcusably dirty and damaging to our environment, littering toxic cigarette butts everywhere they travel. As I wrote previously, smokers dump four and a half trillion cigarette butts every year on our streets, sidewalks, parks, downtowns, parking lots, lawns, and everywhere else smokers feel entitled to leave them. That’s 4,500,000,000,000 pieces of toxic, non-biodegradable, chemical-soaked plastic waste that smokers — and smokers alone — pollute the earth with every year. That’s litter deliberately left to poison the water, kill plants and wildlife, and remain in the environment for more than a decade, doing their damage. An estimated 1.69 billion pounds (845,000 tons) of cigarette butts are littered into the environment, every year. EVERY YEAR! All that damage and garbage from smokers. What’s glamorous about that?*
BBC continues:
Journalist Olivia Petter says the cigarette has become a symbol that represents our nostalgia towards a bygone era of carefreeness, frivolity and hedonism and it’s making an comeback in pop culture… the way smoking is glamorised by celebrities means cigarettes give young people a certain credibility those older than them do not have to work as hard for…
Why would anyone have nostalgia for days when polio crippled and killed millions, when smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis were common diseases? Being addicted to a lethal substance like nicotine was not “carefree” in the past any more than being addicted to heroin, oxycontin, or crack cocaine is today. Those same days of “frivolity” were before the civil rights era, back when people of colour had to sit in the back of the bus, and weren’t allowed to eat in whites-only restaurants. When women couldn’t have a mortgage or a credit card without her husband’s approval. It’s the same dark, misogynistic and racist era that Trump and his fascist MAGA cultists are dragging the USA back to. Where is the credibility in that?
Smoking kills. In the UK it kills “about 80,000 people a year, and is responsible for one in four of all deaths from cancer.” As another BBC story notes:
It is also linked to other serious conditions, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, asthma and dementia. It can affect fertility and pregnancy. Figures from NHS England show there were an estimated 408,000 hospital admissions due to smoking in 2022-2023, up from 389,000 in 2021-2022.
In Canada, there are about 37,000 deaths from smoking every year, or about 100 smoking-related deaths per day. “Smoking is linked to approximately 30% of deaths from cancer in Canada… Over 300 people who have been exposed to secondhand smoke will die of lung cancer and around 700 of coronary heart disease.” In the USA, smoking causes about 480,000 deaths a year, and reduces the life expectancy of smokers by at least 10 years more than for nonsmokers. Also in the USA, secondhand smoke “causes 7,333 annual deaths from lung cancer… and 33,951 annual deaths from heart disease.”
Where is the glamour in that? Where is the street cred in that? Where is the benefit to anyone except the tobacco companies?
In a time of social-media-empowered pseudoscience and conspiracies, the rise of smoking runs parallel to the other mass stupidities that define our century: right now there are thousands of people (mostly grifters and conspiracy cultists) online promoting drinking raw milk, and drinking unfiltered (“raw”) water, anti-fluoridation lies, anti-vaccination lies, homeopathy, ayurveda, reflexology, feng shui, reiki, iridology, astrology, psychics, angels, creationism, tarot cards, yoni eggs (vaginal stones), dietary fads, and other — often unhealthy, or even life-threatening — nonsense. In a nation where millions of people voted for president a convicted felon, serial liar, sexual predator, con artist, racist, misogynist, and fascist, there are clearly many easy marks for grifters pushing conspiracies and pseudoscience. Smoking helps make people gullible to these grifts and conspiracies by lowering smokers’ IQ.**
But the Beeb adds,
According to Truth Initiative, a nonprofit health organisation against smoking, nine out of the 10 films nominated for the Oscars top prize earlier this year featured smoking, which is up from the seven in the year before.
Maybe it’s time people started walking out on or boycotting films that feature smoking. We should be demanding our governments take a more active, aggressive stance to deter smokers and stop smoking: higher taxes on cigarettes and vaping products (and dedicate the income to enforcement and anti-smoking campaigns); greater restrictions on where people can smoke (reduced or limited areas in public spaces, parks, in front of buildings, markets, etc.); greater reductions in where and how tobacco and vaping products can be sold; reductions in public health insurance coverage for smokers (requiring smokers to pay for treatment for smoking-related illnesses); strict enforcement and fines for smokers who litter their butts on public spaces; and bolder warnings on any TV shows or movies that smoking and tobacco use is being presented.
Smoking isn’t glamorous; smoking has no credibility or cool factor; smoking is a treatable addiction that leads to disease, cancer, lower intelligence, and death.
Notes:
* BBC also reported that in the UK recently, a pub changed its name, to the “Poisoned Swan” to help “raise awareness for a charity campaign after discovering smokers were throwing their cigarette butts down drains and in waterways” and contaminating the water. The article adds:
It comes as new research from Keep Britain Tidy found individual drains in the UK have as many as 5,000 cigarette butts dropped in them a year.
Announcing its Bin The Butt campaign, it said cigarettes thrown in drains end up in our waterways, harming wildlife and polluting rivers, and added just one cigarette butt can contaminate up to 1,000 litres (220 gallons) of water.
** Regarding homeopathy, McGill University’s Office for Science and Society (Separating Sense from Nonsense) office said it best: “To put it succinctly, homeopathy is scientifically implausible. Its precepts defy the laws of chemistry, physics and biology. It cannot possibly work.” On yoni eggs: Celebrity wingnut and pseudoscience champion Gwyneth Paltrow introduced women to the idea of stuffing rocks into their vaginas. Pseudoscience debunker Timothy Caulfield mocked her, and Dr. Jen Gunter wrote about Paltrow’s product, saying “the claim that they can balance hormones is, quite simply, biologically impossible” and warned of serious health risks of the practice: “jade is porous which could allow bacteria to get inside and so the egg could act like a fomite… It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.”
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