Too many still beguiled by tobacco's siren

In 1605, Scottish soldier and composer Captain Tobias Hume published a musical setting of an anonymous poem celebrating one of the wonders brought to Europe from the colonies of the New World.

"Tobacco, Tobacco sing sweetly for Tobacco, Tobacco is like love," it went.

Like love, according to the poem, tobacco "makes men sail from shore to shore", "makes men poor", "makes men scorn coward fears" and "sets men by the ears". It ends with an enraptured "O love it, for you see I have proved it".

Clearly, the poet and good Captain Hume were beguiled by tobacco. They wouldn't be the last.

In my youth, pretty much everyone in the United States knew that smoking was addictive and a leading cause of several fatal diseases. There was widespread awareness that longtime smokers were likely killing themselves by increment.

But that didn't stop people.

Most smokers in the US started young, in their early teens. I did.

Smoking was commonplace, and it was an unspoken smokers' right to indulge themselves in any company. Parents would light up in the living room, an automobile or at the dinner table alongside their children.

People smoked on the streets, at any sort of outdoors event, in nightclubs, restaurants, bars, subway stations, airport lounges...

If you were a nonsmoker, too bad. You still had to breathe air made acrid with tobacco fumes.

The interiors of restaurants, long-haul buses, trains and even airliners were divided into smoking and nonsmoking sections - as though the curling billows of smoke exhaled in one section heeded the artificial distinction and stopped spreading mid-air.

But the situation slowly changed. Smoking was gradually banned on any form of public transportation and public facilities. As of 2015, 30 US states had banned smoking in bars and restaurants.

Maybe because of the pushback, the number of smokers also declined. Gallup Polls found that 45 percent of people in the US would have smoked tobacco within a given week in 1954, but only 21 percent in 2008.

However, Gallup also found in 2008 that almost 60 percent of US smokers ages 18 to 29 and nearly 80 percent ages 50 and older considered themselves addicted.

I can attest to how strong that addiction is. For years I tried to stop and would intermittently spend days at a time in a state of listless, lightheaded and distracted irritability before giving up. It's only half-jokingly that I've told friends catching pneumonia was the best thing that ever happened to me. For weeks, I was too sick to even think of smoking, and that broke the addiction.

In some ways, tobacco use in China reminds me of the US in the 1970s and 80s. There are more restrictions here on where smoking is permitted, but it remains rampant and socially accepted.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission has said that smoking kills more than 1 million Chinese annually. That's more than 7 million people since I've been in China. Let's hope public awareness continues to grow.

Contact the writer at lydon@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/21/2017 page2)