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Regan: Smoking taboo doesn't fly abroad

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By Kayla Regan

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Smokers die younger. Smoking kills. Protect children: Don’t make them breathe your smoke.

These are the warnings that decorate my 10 Euro, about $14, pack of Camel Lights. Cigarettes in Lawrence cost less than half of the price here, and don’t come with those pesky reminders that you’re not breathing in anything good. So why am I finding Dublin to be a smokers paradise?

Maybe it has to do with being pushed 20 feet away from doors and entrances while its pouring rain on campus. Here though, I can blissfully seek cover under building overhangs during a typical rainy Dublin day. Ashtrays are outside nearly every building so smokers don’t have to litter the street with cigarette butts (and yes, people use them). Certain bars and restaurants even offer indoor smoking lounges for those who choose to smoke.

The number of smokers here and at home isn’t much different — 20 percent in Kansas and 25 percent in Dublin.

The biggest difference between smoking here and in the states though, is that buying cigarettes doesn’t make you a bad person.

In the U.S., smokers pay a “sin” tax that goes towards healthcare and other public incentives. If smokers are expected to make up for their sinful habit by paying a tax, I wonder why there’s no “glutton” tax on Big Macs that goes towards education. Yes, I know such a move would be impossible, and slightly totalitarian. You can’t prove Big Mac fiends are gluttons in the same way you can prove smokers are bad. Here though, people don’t take much stock in the statistics, which have scared the U.S. into a national health frenzy.

According to John Brignell, a retired Professor of Industrial Instrumentation at the University of Southampton, smoking isn’t nearly as bad as most would believe. In his book, “Sorry, Wrong Number” Brignell claims that of the 400,000 premature deaths a year in the U.S., 60 percent of the smokers who died prematurely were older than 70, and 17 percent of them were 85 and older.

I’m sure Brignell’s own research has flaws and just like anti-smoking studies, I’m sure he also has his own agenda. It goes to show though, that a good and healthy lifestyle is not something that can be quantified with statistics, but needs to be determined by the individual.

This is something understood in Dublin. With more than 1 million people currently living in the city, 10 percent of which come from foreign nations, Dublin is exceptionally open-minded and respectful of individuals and their freedom of choice. And unlike in the U.S., this tolerance is extended to smokers.

Americans, I think, are expected to live a perfect life. But we’ve become so concerned with the longevity of our lives that we sometimes forget about the quality of it.

After living here, I’m more concerned with how I live rather than how people say I should live.

A billboard advertisement in Dublin reads “It’s not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years.”

Comments

Regan: Smoking taboo doesn't fly abroad

So are you becoming an Irish citizen so you may smoke without 'hassle'?

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