Bob Hunter f?M A FORMER © strictly personal three-sometimes-four-packs-a-day smoker who got the nicotine monkey off his back cight years ago. ht seems, as usual, | was just part of a trend. Trends annoy me, as I'm sure they do you. It happens the same way every time. Here you are, thinking you're doing something for all sorts of highly personal reasons, and it turns out you're just part of a statistical blip. Oh well. The last eight years have seen a minor revolution sweep North America, at any rate, when it f comes to smoking. Or is it so minor? Smoking is Jactually a frontline ecological issue, at least for humans. The fact that laws have come into place to curtail this type of pollu- tion is significant, | think. Over in Europe and certainly Asia, smoking does not seem to have declined. In the Third World it is on the increase. The “White Man’s Disease,”’ given to him by the doomed Indians of the Caribbean, has spread everywhere. lt is a nice historic footnote that a plague of drug addiction which began in the Americas should start to ebb on this conti- nent first. Back when | butted out my last cigarette, most of my friends, | would say, were still smokers. Going to a party with a lot of F these same old friends the other night, I noticed that only ONE of them was still puffing, and he was coughing his guts out, of course. The big news was that he, too, had actually kicked the weed for a couple of months, but he had fallen back on the filthy stuff recently. We wished him luck try- } ing again , as try he must. Eight years ago, his efforts to quit would have been slapstick. | know IJ used to joke about it all the times I'd tried to quit. It was a bitter joke, but I knew better than to talk straight about it. After all, nearly everybody else was a junkie, too. And part of our junkie code was to talk about quitting as though it was either a # joke or something sissies did. Muybe the people I was hang- ing out with were too young to know any peers who had been wasted by lung cancer. Maybe it is as simple as the fact that we are all nearly a decade older and Starting to get caught in a proba- bility curve pointing to premature death. “Premature death’ ts such a bizarre phrase. Death, one “'p- poses, is almost ALWAYS premature from the point of view of the person doing the dying. Certainly, most people give every sign of wanting to hang in a little bit Jonger. Odd, then, how the mind can trick a person into thinking he’s not committing slow suicide in public when he is. And of course we now know that exhaled smoke is deadly to others. This second point was far from clear in 1978, when f quit. It was the piece of evidence that chang- ed everything. Smoking went from being ‘‘just’’ suicide to be- ing something closer to criminal neglizence in manslaughicr. One sympathizes with the soul struggling to free itself from nic- otine dependency. The first time I quit, I think | was no more than 17. I'd been addicted for a couple of years. It took me 20 more years, until I was 37, to get off the evil weed. I would guess [ tried to stop, with varying degrees of seriousness, a: least 100 times be- fore | finally succeeded. To say nicotine is not a genuinely nar- cotic drug is to lie, lie, lie. The real crunch on smoking lies ahead. If smokers think they’ve weathered the storm, they're asleep at the switch. Leg- islation to control smoking in the workplace as well as in public is on its way. And even municipal bylaws which force employers to protect non-smokers on the job are not going to be the end of the issue. The anti-smoking lobby is highly organized and looking to the courts for even more sweeping legal prohibitions. Dale Jackaman, executive- director of Airspace, one of the more aggressive anti-smoking lobby groups, says that while “bylaws make it clear to the smoker that smoking is no longer a socially acceptable practice,” they do not go far enough. ‘*Politicans generally lack the political will to give us the pro- tection we need,’’ Jackaman says with scorn. ‘A lot of our politi- cians are also influenced by the powerful and influential tobacco lobby. By far, our most effective means of controlling the en- vironmental smoke problem will be action in the courts.”” So be warned, smokers. You are going to be hounded for the rest of your life, no matter how short it may be. NV City to contrib:te to Draycott sculpture NORTH VANCOUVER City will contribute $1,000 to the bronze statue of Walter Draycott, the “Father of Lynn Valley’’, which is to be erected at the corner park at Lynn Valley and Mountain High- way. “*Mr. Draycott has given a lot to North Vancouver, City and District,"* said Ald. Ralph Hall, who made the motion for the con- tribution, Aug. 11. North Vancouver District coun- cil is paying the lion’s share of the $13,000-$15,000 the statue will cost, with other contributions from the Lynn Valley Lions, Fred Ames Foundation, and the Lynn Valley {mprovement Association. Draycott, who died in 1983, spent most of his 102 years in the area. Among his many contribu- tons, he wrote a book on the his- tory of Lynn Valley. 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