Neil Mackay: Confessions of a dirty teenager … and how we can quit smoking in Scotland –

My adolescent stupidity knew no bounds. After clicking, I danced on the side of the railroad bridge to entertain my girlfriend. We both thought it was pretty cool until we were down and 50 meters from the tracks. Luckily some trees prevented me from falling and I was the new victim otherwise I wouldn’t have written now. Instead, I’d be the faded memory of a long-dead idiot in my hometown.

After packing my bags too late at an illegal children’s party, I took the strangers home in the elevator and, sitting in the back seat, discovered that there was a couple of skinheads in a stolen car. Instead of taking me home, they took me to the terrible joy of the night. It ended happily when they stopped sniffing and sticky sniffing, which allowed me to say goodbye and say hello.

However, perhaps the greatest achievement of my suicidal idea was teaching me to smoke at the age of 14. It was the 1980s. Latchkey’s guys could then run away from almost anything. So one day after I graduated from high school, I made a bad video – real nightmares in a damaged brain if I remember correctly – and I decided to learn how to smoke. Four numbers of embassies from a corner shop. I bought 6 cigarettes, why shouldn’t an adult sell death to a young man in a school uniform?

I clearly remember the afternoon. I also bought a bottle of raspberries so I think I’ll need something to wash the smoke away. Frankly, I was already sophisticated. I was trying some amateur puffs with my friends in the park, but now I’ve turned pro. It was time to breathe.

It was Battle Royale that I entered. For the first few days I had coughing and wheezing – I think I also had wheezing. But if I were a brave soldier, I would fight. After the second cigarette, I had to take a break as my cheeks were turning green. I also had to change what was on TV because watching psychopaths killing people was no longer a pleasant experience while drinking poison. I polished my bright pop and switched to children’s television. It could have been He-Man, it could have been Nogin Nogi, but when the show was over, whatever it was, I was learning to smoke like a big kid.

God help us then – we thought it was cool. Of course, there were millions of people, young and old, with basic intelligence who realized that absorbing the chemicals of lung cancer was not the best plan in the world. But for a long time they were in the minority.

Many of us, especially the GenXers, thought smoking was in this century. Smart people saw cigarettes as a fashion accessory, even though we knew full well that cigarettes kill us. But we were 20 and deaths only happen to the elderly, right? We grew up smoking and “you see a monkey, you make a monkey” – that’s not a sad old truth. Our parents and grandparents were busy – houses steamed porridge back then; Everyone was watching TV, our teachers were watching school, I’m sorry. Doctors also smoked. You used to be able to smoke on airplanes, but then in the 1970s it was pretty easy to miss a plane.

Unfortunately, the medical profession eventually destroyed their own cigarettes and started a campaign against tobacco. Hallelujah, the rate of decline of cigarettes since the turn of the century is staggering. Less than 20% of Scots currently smoke. Historians look back and examine what happened as a near-perfect example of how social policy can change public habits in a few years.

But when the smoking ban went into effect in 2006 and cigarettes became a symbol of Paris, many people my age were obsessed with quitting. We have endured hugs in the rain like lepers just to get a little closer to death. I quit a few years ago after an unrelated smoking disease, which ironically sent me to the hospital. When I got out, I left. I will never look back. Smoking was my biggest, most dangerous, stupidest, most expensive and most smelly mistake. I wish I’d never learned to breathe that day in the 80s next to my trusty raspberries.

We are now in the midst of quitting smoking completely. Those born in New Zealand after 2008 are prohibited from buying cigarettes. Denmark introduces the same laws for those born after 2010. It is rumored that the UK government could do the same, but the ban could potentially affect anyone born since 1997. Scotland has highly amorphous plans to be “smoke free by”. 2034 “.

I have not smoked after I quit smoking. I hate smoking around right now, but adults are free to do whatever they want – that’s my opinion. So while the UK government risks going a little further, Denmark and New Zealand could enter Goldilocks territory.

Everyone in the world thinks children shouldn’t touch cigarettes today, unless it’s a terrible learning tool in history class. But England threatens to coerce the adults. If a tobacco ban were introduced today for those born in 1997, it would mean that smokers who are now 25 years old would effectively be banned. We would meet the absurd possibility of adult men and women still addicted to cigarettes asking the elderly to buy them a solution – like desperate teenagers looking for an immoral bond to take an unlicensed “leap”. The sale of tobacco should be banned – or rather phased out – but done in a judicious way that does not torture teenagers who are still addicted.

Here is a possible fair solution: You must be 18 today to buy tobacco in Scotland. This means that you shouldn’t be addicted if you are under the age of 18, and if you are, you have done so illegally. After 18 years of work, we have arrived at 2004. Perhaps this date is, to be honest, the point we have chosen to say “no more”.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their views. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Herald.

Source: Herald Scotland

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