Just Another Blog
Monday, December 09, 2002
 
Smoking and Sex

"Most smokers in Europe would find it easier to give up sex for a month than cigarettes," that's the lede to this story on the difficulties of quitting smoking. Well, as someone who has given up both, I can tell you that qutting smoking is indeed incredibly difficult. But at the same time, I don't find myself closing my eyes and fantasizing about Marlboros.

Really what I thought was interesting in the story was the comment that, "In every single country the vast majority of smokers want to stop," according to an anti-smoking crusader. I know that the French and Japanese, for example, smoke like chimneys and that a lot of French and Japanese seem to smoke. It never occurred to me though that most of them didn't want to smoke. I wonder if this is distortion by the zealous or whether as an isolated American I am slow to attribute these common-sense feelings to foreigners? Probably some of each.