The Smoking Room

Back in the 1960s, various health organizations began telling a story that would change our smoky world: cigarettes are bad for your health.

Until that point, while many had heard the tell-tale smokers cough, cigarettes had been as much a part of the North American experience as apple pie and pitchers of beer. When I asked my grandmother if it bothered her that her first husband smoked, she had responded, well, no. Everyone smoked. She had dabbled with cigarettes on occasion, until they became less fashionable and sifted their way into the counter culture, where her daughter, in the 1970s, would take up smoking in bathrooms stalls to be ‘cool.’

Today, the most worrisome demographic of smokers continues to be young women - the only demographic that keeps smoking at an increasing and alarming rate. This is also the demographic that is becoming the new face of HIV, and a host of other health problems previously relegated to completely different health groups.

This has the health organizations terribly upset and confused.

They keep using, with increasing desperation, the only message they have ever had: cigarettes are bad for your health. Cigarettes are bad for your health! Don’t you hear me? Look, I’ll show you a lung! See? Look! Cigarettes are bad for your health!

Young girls keep ignoring and taking up that filtered teat, and it’s no wonder: they all knew that cigarettes could and would kill them when they started smoking. They knew every harmful effect of cigarettes the day they bought their first pack…and they bought them, and continue to buy them, anyway. If you want to stop them from smoking, you’ll have to answer the question…Why?

Why do young women choose to smoke, even though they know that smoking will destroy their bodies slowly and eventually cut their lives short?

And hells if I know the answer - but I suspect that it’s an important one.

Perhaps there is a common factor in all the illnesses and behaviours that plague young women more-so than any other demographic. Smoking nestles in nicely with increased incidence of HIV and other STIs, coupled with dangerous or unprotected sex. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, self injury, trichotilomania...all of these are behaviours found primarily in young women. All of these behaviours willingly and flagrantly sacrifice health. All of them persist despite the protests of health professionals, while rates of anxiety and depression among young women continue to soar.

But really, what do I know - I’m not even a smoker. I’ve thought about being one - in fact, I've spent long periods desperately craving a cigarette despite never having tasted one. This thought would not have entered my mind before working downtown, where I found that everyone smoked and that cigarettes were a valued commodity.

I bought my first pack to bribe women into liking me, and it worked. Staff who smoke have a better rapport - they can sit out on the deck and talk about life between drags, while I sit inside, alone, in the staff room, with my insidious, clean air. They get frequent breaks to sit outdoors and take long, contemplative breaths - a luxurious thing, really, that non-smokers rarely request for themselves. And I don’t envy the cyanide, or the tar, or even the nicotine…but the statement of not giving a shit, of knowing that you’ll die and smoking anyways, in a population that walks so very close to the edge of death…even that seems a little alluring.

When I ask them why they took up smoking, the answers don't tell me too much....all of my friends smoked, I wanted to be cool in the 80s, and I did it to get back at an ex-boyfriend. I was drinking a lot, or I wanted to stay warm, or I was already using and really, if you're smoking crack, cigarettes are the lesser of many evils. And so on.