i used to smoke. what the hell was i thinking?

I didn’t really start smoking until I was 18 or so and beginning college, although smoking had been all around me for years. Both my parents, like most everyone of that generation, smoked. Pretty much all the time. In fact, my father, while in a hospital oxygen tent in the process of dying, continued to try to bum cigarettes off anyone who visited him.

My friends all were smokers. All my cultural idols—sports heroes, movie stars, prominent people from all walks of life—they all lit up. Hell, even doctors apparently smoked; in the pages of Life Magazine, advertisements showed photogenic actors in white coats puffing out and telling readers that “More Doctors Smoke Camels” or that “20,679 Physicians” preferred Lucky Strike.

In those days just before the U.S. Surgeon General’s landmark report that confirmed, indeed, that smoking wasn’t so great for your health, around 42 percent of America’s adult population smoked. It was the high-water mark for smoking in the U.S.

I was a little late to the game because I had asthma. Even without the surgeon general, I had sort of intuited that inhaling smoke into my damaged lungs wasn’t a particularly smart thing to do. Although, at the time I couldn’t quite articulate the reasons why I shouldn’t be smoking, I held off, at least for a bit. And then, in college, I willingly joined the smoking pack.

And I wonder now: what the hell was I thinking?

My cigarette of choice was Parliament. I think I liked the sound of the word, its seeming elegance. And the box seemed, to my then-18-year-old mind, kind of cool. As did, I admit, the whole smoking thing. We smokers were hip. Or was it hep back then?

Sure, I never got to the point of needing to smoke first thing in the morning, grabbing the night before’s last butt to start my day. But there were times, sitting at a desk at the college newspaper, surrounded by billows of smoke, when I would have a cigarette between my fingers, another dangling from my mouth and a third glowing in a nearby ashtray. I remember getting cigarette holes in sweaters I would pull over my head, forgetting I had a glowing cigarette in my mouth.

I smoked, I figured, something like two to three packs a day. Yes, even after the surgeon general’s report. For a dozen years or so, I smoked, despite my asthma, despite my wife’s pleas, despite an inchoate awareness that this couldn’t be a good thing despite how many sports and movie stars endorsed it.  

What the hell was I thinking?

I gave up smoking, finally, after asking my friend Steve, the newly minted doctor, what was the likelihood of my getting a serious lung disease like emphysema by, say, the time I was 40—when 40 didn’t seem that far away.

Steve, of course, couldn’t give me precise figures, but did say that with the extent of my habit, with the duration of my habit and with the fact of my asthma, emphysema by the time I reached 40 was very much a possibility.

I stopped. And started wondering, from that moment on, what the hell was I thinking?

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking that. Today, less than 20 percent of Americans are smokers, the lowest percentage in 80 years. Anybody who has been paying the least amount of attention knows smoking is terrible for you and is the leading cause of preventable death. (Vaping, although not quite as dangerous, isn’t great for you either in case you may have been wondering.)

And yet …

Smoking, apparently, is now making a comeback, of sorts. It’s being depicted, once again, as sort of cool. There’s a sexy Charli XCX (you know who she is, right?) on the cover of Rolling Stone with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. While there are no doctor ads touting smoking any more, there’s Cillian Murphy puffing away throughout the entire three hours of “Oppenheimer” and Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio and other Hollywood stars inhaling away on the big screen.   

They’re not convincing me this time. I have a visceral antipathy to smoking now. I can’t stand being around smokers or where smoking had taken place. If someone is smoking, even on a sidewalk, I give them a wide berth. If there has been smoke in a hotel room or elevator or a building lobby I leave as soon as I can.

It seems incredible to me now that I once smoked. Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all.