It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and I’m anxiously awaiting my meeting with yet another disgruntled customer in the tragic pose I always find myself in before these weekly disasters: hunched over a bar, staring into a pretentious beer I can’t afford, wondering how I got here and how much this is going to hurt. While one hand swirls suds, the other is clenched and desperately in need of a cigarette. Alas, there will be no smoking. Heaven forbid I pollute my lungs while my blood pressure’s rising and the brews break down my brain cells.

I have never been a full-time smoker and I’ll probably never be like the dad who can’t walk his daughter down the aisle in that mortifying anti-smoking commercial, but I do enjoy the occasional puff after a long day breaking my back. At the end of each week when I’ve spent all of my money on taxes, bills, and the beans, canned corn, and iced tea mix that keep me nourished enough to repeat this cycle every two weeks, I’d like to think I’m due some kind of vice, lungs be damned.

Anyway, social smoking has been great to me. In high school, the kids who smoked cigarettes were also the same kids who were interested in the counter cultural music, books, and ideas that would come to be my greatest hobbies. They were intelligent and cool and smoked, maybe, because yeah, they wanted to be perceived as such. Some of them became my best friends in both high school and college. By endeavoring to appear bitter, crass, and intellectual, they succeeded. Think of it as The Secret…with a side of cancer…I know I do. In any event, my social life taught me one thing. Smoking is cool.

This continued well into college. At SUNY Albany, cigarettes were a great icebreaker when meeting girls and a great stress reliever during long nights spent doing papers. There was something psychologically gratifying and comforting about tobacco that fresh air could simply never duplicate.

Despite all the social beneficence cigarettes showered upon me, there’s always been that elephant in the room. Those things are fucking killers. Clearly. Different people have different tolerance for smoking, and that’s clear, but they leave you with lungs like leather. Still, some people smoke a pack a day for thirty years and get hit by a garbage truck. Some people smoke a pack a day for ten years and get tumors. At the end of the day, how bad are the consequences of this free decision made by reasonable, conscious adults and teenagers armed with all the facts? For comparison, imagine your shelf life if you drank 20 shots of whiskey a day, or ate 20 cans of tuna? Is it that bad?

“WORSE!” they’ll tell you.

Again. And again. And again.

They never stop telling you.

Here I find myself after 27 years, living in my own apartment(barely) and away from the grasp of my loving parents, in my sixth year as a full fledged adult in the United States of America, working ten hour days and coming home only to be bombarded with television advertising warning me about the dangers of smoking. Shouldn’t this crap be confined to the schoolhouse? After the age of 18, shouldn’t we be able to make our own decisions, after reviewing a decade of horrifying commercials telling us how bad cigarettes are and seeing for ourselves?

I think so, and I’m calling bullshit. Here’s some of my least favorite cigarette advertisements, and why they’re so incredibly atrocious.

Down the Aisle

How it Goes:

We are greeted  by a trailer for the kind of terrible movie people in relationships as dead as Michael Jackson go to see. A father must come to terms with the fact that his little girl is all grown up and he has to give her up on her wedding day. But WAIT…Trick-er-ation ensues! The shot pans out, and we see a father hooked up to an IV, a respirator, and all kinds of monitors. He can’t walk his daughter down the aisle, because he smoked cigarettes, and now he’s going to die!

Why It’s Crap: While the father might not be able to walk his little girl down the aisle at her wedding, it’s only because he worked the kind of backbreaking job makes a man need a pack of cigarettes a day and some suds that she’s paying for these nuptials! If not for daddy, she’d be married by a justice of the peace behind a gay man and his illegal immigrant friend and two idiots on a meth bender.  If anything, the sad spectacle of father, in wheelchair, being rolled down the aisle to give his daughter away, would make for a heroic profile in perseverance. And a much better film. As in Casablanca, cigarettes enhance the production.

Focus on the Positive

Film- In Michael Moore style a bunch of ethnically diverse, hiply dressed teens(lead by the indispensable light skinned black kid with dreadlocks- of course) walk into a tobacco building and start asking executives why they don’t tell people cigarettes contain arsenic. A musical breaks out. A bunch of kids who failed to make the cast of High School Musical take their anger out on the tobacco industry. We’re told to focus on the positives of cigarettes, and ignore all the health issues. We’re told that someone dies from smoking every 8 seconds.

Why It’s Crap- Cigarettes have warnings on the pack, and they’re meant for consumption by adults. Tobacco companies have to count on the government that they’re paying all those lawsuit damages to for law enforcement and education. But besides that, as a 19 year old adult in a society with public education who has spent the a dozen years in the school system and the rest of his/her waking life viewing advertisements telling them smoking is for losers who do it just to be popular. What part of “smoking causes cancer” tattooed across the pack don’t people understand. Anyone who grew up around a single person who died from smoking knows this. It’s a fucking terrible way to go. And they smoke anyway. After 18 years on this planet gathering information, you should know any of the lies perpetrated by the tobacco industry are crap, unless you’re a waterhead.

But that’s not all. For years we’ve been told that people smoke cigarettes because of “peer pressure,” because they’re desperate to be cool and fit in, and that’s wrong. Be yourself, be strong was always the appeal, and it was pretty damn resonant. Cool on your own terms. Great until 8^th grade; Then you get to high school, and you realized that if you’re not particularly wealthy, good looking, or athletic, there’s not much you have to offer the outside world and you better fucking smoke! After all, it’s one of the few avenues you have to make friends. So what does the anti-smoking lobby do?  Onnnnnly now, when it’s clear that smoking actually IS cool, do the anti-smoking advocates decide to dress their jackboot hipster tween cast up in the Urban Outfitters catalogue and put on a high school musical. “Quit smoking and you’ll be cool too!”

The moral of this story: “Don’t be a fruity tool. High School Musical is lame, and so is your health. Cigarettes are punk rock. Smoke cigarettes. Live fast, die young. Fuck it.

The Brazilian Dead Baby Ad

The Premise: Ummm…here

Why It’s Crap: Babies can’t smoke. Especially dead ones. DUH! Besides that, society can’t expect to account for the retards that still don’t know you shouldn’t smoke during pregnancy. But nature can, and does, as is possibly evidenced by this picture. If one less dolt who smokes during her pregnancy ends up NOT procreating….? I fail to see how that’s any sort of tragedy.

Look, cigarettes are bad for you, but so is life. Divorce is bad for you.  Taxes are bad for you. Booze is bad for you.  Whores are bad for you. A combination of these things is likely to kill you, although sometimes, a combination of these things will leave you feeling absolutely phenomenal (well, not taxes).  At the end of the day, if you want an occasional cigarette, have one, and if you decide you want to die hacking up the half of your lung that’s left, God bless you too.