Posted on 12/08/2008 8:43:31 PM PST by Eric Blair 2084
I took a red-hot babe to one of those monster truck deals at the now-defunct Sports Arena in Toledo once. As you said, the exhaust choked you. Smokers were, of course, taboo. I looked around, and noticed other people were starting to light up, so we both did, too. Not one person said anything, including security, a few of whom were smoking too. The bar and restaurant owners here tried to use this to stop the smoking ban before it went through by holding a demonstration outside the arena, claiming ‘smoke is smoke’.
Well, I used Chantix to quit one year after becoming a widow, when I was already depressed and it did not increase my depression. I did have intense dreams, but I liked them. I smoked while using the drug until I realized that the nicotene was not affecting me anymore, and I haven’t had or wanted a cigarette for 13 monts now.
I smoked for 40 years and I didn’t think I would ever quit, or want to. Then a friend went into the hospital for open heart surgery and she was a smoker. They gave her Chantix in the hospital and she’s never smoked again either.
I have several other friends who took it and hd success. I only know one person who didn’t follow through, and no one I know reported suicidal tendencies.
http://www.conservative.org/columnists/keene/070313dk.htm
Like the House Minority Leader and “Smoker In Chief” John Boehner:
Smoke and Mirrors
The Hill
March 13, 2007
When it was reported last week that House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) is now frequenting the Democratic National Club over on Ivy Street (which is, as it turns out, one of the very few places in the new Washington where the inveterate smoker can light up), I took notice because, well, sometimes little things can tell you a lot about people and the way they look at the world.
As everyone who lives, works or spends much time in the District knows, a citywide anti-smoking ordinance passed the D.C. City Council last year and went into effect on Jan. 2 of this year. It is one of the most comprehensive such bans in the nation, applying even to private clubs such as the Republican Capitol Hill Club. The ordinance was hotly debated before it passed. Various attempts at compromise failed and anti-smokers and smokers alike held their collective breath as it went to Congress, which has the last word on such things in the Federal City.
Smokers appealed to friends on the Hill, as they had to members of the City Council, to be reasonable, so that at least those who had joined private clubs so that they might there find sanctuary to enjoy a drink and a cigar might be allowed to continue puffing away in private. The pleas fell on deaf ears, however, and today those who enjoy an occasional pipe or cigar are with few exceptions forced to repair to park benches and sidewalks.
The ban did not apply to Congress, of course, as our elected officials have always seen fit to exempt themselves from the rules, regulations and silliness they impose on the rest of us, but the recapture of the House by Democrats last fall put politically correct friends of the anti-smokers in charge of at least one House with the power to restrict, if not eliminate, smoking on the Hill.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) struck quickly, banning smoking in the Speaker’s Lounge in spite of the fact that many members of her new majority could be found there puffing away any time the House was in session.
They crept away in silence and repaired, like their GOP counterparts, to their private offices to light up—though at least one politically correct freshman protested even this on the grounds that the smoke from an adjoining member’s office had somehow, through osmosis or magic, found its noxious way through the foot-thick masonry separating them.
It is fair to say that most of those who make up the core of the anti-smoking lobby are ideological liberals and partisan Democrats. Their justification for most smoking bans has been their innate concern for everyone’s health, and their argument for extending such bans to private establishments has been that those who work in establishments that tolerate smoking are put at risk by their employment there.
Given that rationale, I found it interesting that these very same liberal Democrats who think it reasonable to enjoin the rest of us from lighting up in restaurants and private clubs had far less concern for the health and well-being of those who choose to work at the Democratic National Club, which, it now transpires, is the one private club in the District that has apparently decided simply to defy the ban.
Another time I was at an outdoor patio area at a local seafood restaurant and the restaurant was running a grill about 5 feet from my table. This is on one of those “live jazz nights” that attracts a bunch of cougars. I lit up and this lady at the next table started the coughing and waving her hand act. I started talking loudly to my compatriates that they should quit the grilling on the patio as it was so bothersome to that lady. She turned around and noticed she was sitting with her back to a grill and got all red. A couple of minutes later she left.
I love smoke nazi extremists.
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