Welcome
by Neil Caudle
After emphysema stopped my father’s heart, I inherited a shoebox stuffed with the coupons he’d saved from packs of Camel cigarettes. Many years later, the coupons still reek of tobacco. Who will redeem them, and what is my prize?
In this issue, you will find several unsettling images of people whose bodies have been damaged by smoking. Our purpose is not to shock or repel you. In our society, we’ve had plenty of glamorous images of models holding cigarettes. The idea is to balance the glamour, to help people face what tobacco can do.
Advocacy of this kind is as unnatural for a research magazine as it is for the researchers themselves. Generally, research is about pursuing new knowledge, not about taking a stand. But sometimes, the facts compel action, and this is one of those times. Too many children are taking up smoking. A good number of our faculty members think that scientists and educators should help change that. And they are.
But in our zeal to shun smoking, do we shun the smoker, too? More than once, as we’ve worked on this story, we’ve been reminded that intolerance can be a poison as virulent as any we’d find in tobacco. And when it comes to shunning, are some smokers more equal than others? If William Faulkner or Lillian Hellman or Albert Einstein or Barack Obama were to appear miraculously in my living room and light up, would I show any one of them the door? No, I would not. So whose secondhand smoke would I tolerate? How special would the person have to be?
I would certainly not turn my father away, if he could appear in my living room smoking his Camel. But I would invite him out to the porch. And sooner or later I’d get around to asking him to please try, just one more time, to stop. So when I open that shoebox of mine, here is what it says to me, these days: Abide the smoker, not the smoke.
