The smoker winces when he reads this kind of look into his future—but it doesn't stop him from smoking.

It didn't stop you, did it?

And do you want to know why? Well, for one thing, part of your mind doesn't believe it. Part of your mind thinks that smoking is just swell for you, that it makes you happier and healthier and nicer-looking and maybe even richer and stronger and more glamorous—and this part of your mind flatly refuses to pay attention to anything in conflict with its beliefs.

WE KEEP DELAYING DIFFICULT DECISIONS

People will almost never exchange present discomfort for possible future comfort—and there's another reason for continuing to smoke. Why be nervous and tense today? Who cares about what happens twenty years from now? Heck, in ten years the bombs may fall and kill us all! Anyhow, you have to die of something. Why not have some fun today? All those were typical rebuttals of mine—and here are some of the other points I used to tick off in my mind after something or someone had challenged my smoking:

Item: Tension is a bad thing, and is known to be responsible for physiological damage. It contributes to heart ailments. It can cause ulcers. Smoking, on the other hand, seems to relax people. When a man is faced with a decision, when a woman is caught up in a whirl of nervousness, a pause for a smoke seems to have a reliably relaxing effect. The "butterflies-in-the-stomach" kind of anxiety which people experience in social or business situations is frequently eliminated or at least subdued by smoking. In other words, a cigarette is a sort of drugless tranquilizer. A good thing— score one for smoking.

Item: Besides, there are now good filter cigarettes. Some of that "health propaganda" may be accurate, and perhaps a number of people can be harmed by smoking, or are allergic to it—but fortunately, there are now cigarettes which filter out many of the possibly harmful irritants. The new filters are quite advanced, and in some vague way are similar in content and efficiency to the filters utilized on airplanes and in the production of atomic energy; in other words, able to filter almost anything out of anything.

Item: Furthermore, practically everybody smokes. For every ten adults you know, you can think of six or seven or eight who smoke. You can think of athletes and coaches and actors who smoke (and you don't see them dying all over the place, do you?). People "in the know"—statesmen and politicians and newspaper editors seen on television—are invariably smoking. You can even name doctors who smoke! If they were really so concerned, wouldn't they just use a little will power or self-control and stop? Yes. Obviously then, they realize that there's a mighty difference between dropping tars from a cigarette on the shaved back of a rat and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

If you look back over these fairly typical responses, you'll see how nicely they cloud the issues. Even I used to have to laugh at my own excuses for continuing to smoke, and even I was amused at the fact that I could transform an AMA report about cancer in men and women to cancer "on the shaved back of a rat" in a few hundred words.

So I decided that I had to look deeper. I began to wonder about the psychological values of smoking.

CIGARETTES ARE A "STATUS SYMBOL"

I realized on reflection that in almost every culture there is some sort of public declaration of one's coming of age. The primitives in Africa and South America perform elaborate rites to mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood. In the United States, our "ritual" consists of the freedom to smoke in public.

Until a certain point, our young people are prohibited from smoking. "It will stunt your growth," we warn them. "Only bad kids smoke." As the youngsters grow older, we tell them to wait: "You're not old enough to smoke. You're still a kid." Man, do we make that forbidden fruit attractive!