May contain adult scenes....

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by alatar

I use this to teach my kids what addiction means:

"See those people standing over there by the doorway. It's forty below (an easy temp for both ºF and ºC fans), and yet they're out there, puffing away.

That's addiction."

My husband has been saying the same thing for years. He calls them "smoking exiles." He also counts the number of cars with a single occupant while he's on the bus for the morning commute, and about 70 percent of them have drivers who are smoking. As I'm allergic to tobacco smoke (and haven't been able to stand the smell of smoke since I was a little kid), I'm going to be quite happy in about a year when our state's ban on all public smoking goes into effect. The guy who was hanging his butt out his car's window and flicking his ashes into ours yesterday evening just made me that much more eager for the ban to start.

That said, I've known a lot of smokers in my life (in my mother's family, it was apparently a required practice of the family religion, drinking. I was considered a freak for wanting to do neither). I don't really care if people want to smoke, but I do want them to keep their smoke to themselves, which they can't do. Therein lies the rub. My friends who smoked were very polite about it, long before it was fashionable (or required). But I did notice one thing among them: most of the people who were exclusively pipe smokers could take it or leave it. They smoked only occasionally, and when some needed to quit because of their health, they had no trouble doing so. Not so for cigarette smokers. Now, maybe I just happen to know a remarkable bunch of people, but I've long wondered if there's a manufacturing difference between the two. Wouldn't surprise me.

I disliked smoking even before I read LotR, but it had no influence on my liking of the book or the characters (Gandalf has always been my favorite). The book was not only written during a time when smoking was socially acceptable, it was a fantasy set in another time and place. It certainly did not influence my attitudes about smoking, any more than it made me believe I could go out and learn magic spells or develop hairy feet. I think kids of today are as capable of separating fantasy from reality, if adults will let them. Screenwriters can downplay a thing without totally eliminating it, if it is necessary to the plot or character. If it isn't, it can simply be left out, but it shouldn't be replaced by something silly, like candy (which is just as big a no-no in today's world).