Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 08, 2018

She’s a lovely teacher, and obviously likes Caulfield!

4 out of 5 doctors prefer Pall Malls. That 5th guy is an oncologist.

Lucky Strike Green goes to war! (Thank you for your service!)

Big Tobacco has always lied for profit. May they get what they did to their consumers.

Makes you wonder which of today’s ads are putting our health in danger with lies.

Oh my god!! Are they….are they GETTING ALONG?! The holidays MUST be coming!

Did she ever quit smoking? She seems to be implying here that she quit, but I don’t remember her (or anyone else) previously saying so.

She is just honest enough without breaking down that hard shell

I remember when I used to smokeG in the office – which room I shared with others – with a pile of butts in the ashtray on my desk, and it didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with that. It was standard.

Then, suddenly, smoking indoors was banned almost everywhere. I had to go outside. I remember thinking that they were making me stand outside in February in 20 degrees for the sake of my health. Still get cancer, just get pneumonia, too.

Boy is it a good thing I quit. It’s about 10 bucks a pack now. And it’s just been banned everywhere in my co-op, even in your own apartment.

And making a lot more money than the others because of a constantly replenishing demographic.

Smoking is still a thing and attempts to stifle it are wide spread. A much worse condition, drug addiction, is almost ignored. It is as if smoking openly infringes on another person’s space and thus needs to be quashed. By comparison, drug use is individual and harder to detect and, even though much more harmful to all, doesn’t seem to rate the same effort.

Example: several decades ago, one of the anti drug tv ads rated most effective in reducing drug use among young people showed a frying pan with an egg cooking – cut line: This is your brain. The egg slowly burned to ashes, then blew away – cut line: This is your brain on drugs

Just as its effect began to be strong enough to show a positive trend in drug reduction, the government yanked it for no known reason. Since then, PSA’s (Public Service Ads or Announcements) have faded from use.

Can one surmise that the government no longer has any interest in the general health of the people it is supposed to serve? Witness recent FDA approval of an opioid many times the strength of the previous oxycontin, which has been the center of major drug overuse problems in recent years. Then decide.

Anyone else remember the candy cigarettes? Looked like a tiny pack of cigs, but was candy for kids, ’60’s, maybe early ’70’s.

Salem: a breath of springtime … right!

True story: one of the dissenting doctors on the first commissions to evaluate the evidence against smoking (ie he thought the evidence did not point to the hazard) was a smoker, who got lung cancer a few years later and died.

actually pretended to smoke so that I could take a breakin the office. the boss, a smoker of course would alwayscome in and hand the work to the non smokers and takethe smokers out.

smoke if you have them

in the old movie ,The Day The Earth Stood Still, doctors are talking about a human looking alien who was incredibly old but still fit and young. The doctors said that his advanced culture probably knew things about health that we had yet to learn…and the doctors were both smoking cigarettes.

It doesn’t surprise me that people lie. It’s the inconsistency of the prevalence of lying. You’d think people and institutions would lie all the time, because, well, it works. But the practice seems to come and go like fashion trends.

Let us retreat to a more innocent time, when Lance Armstrong was racking up Tour de France wins with a bloodstream that would make Timothy Leary’s look like tap water. Of course he was doping. He would say so later. But he wouldn’t say so then. That was no surprise. What interested me was that, while refusing to admit it, he wouldn’t full-on lie. He hedged, big-time. “Never tested positive,” he said. “Never used a banned substance,” he said. Okay, even those weren’t completely truthful. There was some evidence that positive tests never saw the light of day. And if he was enough of a pioneer to use a substance before the anti-doping commissions could ban it, well, then it wasn’t technically using a banned substance. But I don’t recall him ever flat-out, full-on lying, “No, I don’t dope.” It was an interesting distinction, being willing to cheat but not willing to fully lie.

Whatever the case, as far as Armstrong fell (and would that we could all fall so hard — there will never be a better lead than in John Richardson’s 2014 profile in Esquire: “Here in purgatory, the mansion is smaller …”), he can enjoy the distinction of, in a relative sense, in the context of the right epoch, holding up just fine in the glow of Diogenes’ candle.

Cigarettes aren’t dangerous? Hell, they were once marketed, by people who fully knew better, as practically vitamins. And people believed it, bought it, embraced it. Inhaled it. Readily. Much more readily than they accepted the truth that those cigarettes were in fact killing them.

Continued:

And maybe that’s it. Tobacco companies could lie so shamelessly because their audience liked the lie better than the truth. Armstrong’s audience was not quite so uniform nor invested. We’re a little more fickle with our stars than we are with our addictions, so maybe he had to leave a margin of doubt or even room for forgiveness, because that’s what his audience required. The liars don’t drive the trend; the believers manage the liars.

For all our similes and metaphors about sheep, nature is a little more clear: It’s the wolf who follows the flock.

gocomics.comFrazz by Jef Mallett for November 08, 2018 | GoComics.com

I once knew a man who smoked FIVE packs of UNFILTERED Chesterfields a day. He was literally a walking chimney. He often wondered why he had so much trouble breathing (DUH). Funny thing is, his last name was Diekopf (Die cough)… kid you not.