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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Enrique de Melchor has passed away (Jan. 9 2012 18:37:52)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rombsix
Indeed, but odds are higher you will die earlier when you are a heavy smoker / cocaine user.
I've read several studies indicating most people are pretty poor at estimating the odds, or responding to them.
My great-uncle, Custis Lee Jernigan (named after his cousin, Robert E. Lee's only son) was a chain smoker. He was 75 in the early 1950s when we picked him up in Mississippi and took him to Texas to see my grandfather for the first time in forty-odd years.
Sharing the back seat of the car with him as he lit one cigarette after another, I asked him, "Uncle Tuss, did you always smoke so much?"
"I've smoked two packs of Camel cigarettes every day since they came into the stores," he replied. "Before that, when I was a young man, I had a boy to follow me around, rolling cigarettes, but I gave it up as an affectation."
He lived in robust good health until he was 96, still smoking two packs of Camels per day. One Saturday he asked his eldest son to assemble all the other children after church the next day.
"Why is that," the son asked.
"I think I'm going to die," said Uncle Tuss.
After the party on Sunday afternoon, he took to his bed and died before noon on Monday. I never knew the exact cause of death. Maybe no one else did, either.
It's events like this that distract people from the odds.
I started smoking when I was 16, before the connection between smoking and lung cancer was widely publicized. I quit when I was 28, because I didn't like the way it made me feel. About that time, the cancer connection began to be publicized. Other ill effects from smoking seem not to be publicized so much in the USA.
Ill effects from using cocaine, evident among some of my acquaintance in the 1970s-1980s, seem not to be publicized at all in the USA. In Austin and other centers of the 1960s counter culture a popular movement to warn of the dangers of methamphetamine sprang up in the early 1970s. Graffiti everywhere anounced, "Speed kills."
Unsuccessful efforts to stamp out entirely the use of methamphetamine and cocaine get a lot more time on the TV than warnings of the ill effects.
These unsuccessful efforts keep the price of cocaine very high, funneling billions of dollars into the pockets of Mexican cartels every year. The violent response of the cartels to the Mexican government's attempts to suppress them threatens to destabilize the country.
RNJ
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