Be careful where you smoke, or better yet, just quit.

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

I can still remember my first cigarette.

I was about 12. I'd already experimented with candy cigarettes, popular in the late 50's and my friends and I used to smoke what we called “punk wood,” a kind of a shrub that used to grow in the bush around Castlegar with a hollow stem. We'd light one end of it around a bonfire and draw the smoke down the tube and into our tender and still developing lungs.

Oh, did we think we were cool!

But now it was time to make the jump to the bigs and my sly mother, a long time smoker herself, was eager to help me along. So she lit one of her Players, Du Maurier – I can't remember exactly what it was – and being the dumb, somewhat extroverted 12-year-old I was, I took a long, deep, drag and ##!%!!&%@$! Oh my God, I almost threw up and I can honestly tell you that was the first and last regular cigarette I ever attempted to smoke. ( Yes, yes. I'm also a child of the '60's and there were funny cigarettes around in those halcyon days, and unlike a certain former president, I did inhale. But that was more than 40 years ago and no longer counts. I've never smoked a real cigarette. Not too many people can say that.

But thanks to probably the most successful public health program in history and some justly deserved million dollar fines to the tobacco companies this is all changing and changing drastically. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, the Canadian smoking rate is down to 20.8 per cent and “Supernatural B.C.” has the lowest rate of all at 17.4 per cent although the rate is slightly higher in the Interior Health region at 17.6 per cent and that includes the Kootenays where the smoking rate is usually higher than most other regions of the province.

And you'd have to have been living under a rock the past 20 years to not have noticed the difference. Remember the good ol' days when office smokers would have ashtrays piled so high with butts that you could hardly see the ashtray itself. It seems like only yesterday that smoking was barred in restaurants, pubs and bingo establishments, one of the last bastions to go. How many people can remember hockey games when by the third period there would be a thin, blue haze hanging over the ice? As a lifelong non-smoker, I remember and I don't miss it. I seriously doubt if they sell candy cigarettes anymore and you don't see magazine ads where people say they smoke the same brand as their doctor. In an old magazine I came across recently, I saw the most incredible smoking ad ever for a fire-proof comforter that you could crawl under so you didn't need to worry about smoking in bed. No kidding!

The renunciation of smoking by modern day society is one of the greatest cultural shifts of our times, but the battle isn't quite over yet according to a recent call I got from a local resident.

The caller was a lady that suffers from asthma, who didn't appreciate someone smoking beside her in one of the City bus shelters just off Baker Street downtown. She especially didn't appreciate smoke being blown in her face when the shelter, as do all bus shelters in the city, clearly displays a no smoking sign on the glass with a fine of up to $2,000 for offenders under City Bylaw 3020.

Ignorance of the law, of course, is not a defence, but it's hard to keep up with every law and regulation in these fast moving times, so I did a little research and this is what I found out. Under the provincial Tobacco Control Act, no one below 19 is allowed to smoke and smoking is not allowed in any public building, workplace or enclosed structure, which includes bus shelters. Under the provincial law, fines for smoking in prohibited areas can be as high as $5,000, a steep price for consorting with the Nicotine God. And in some cases like bus shelters there is jurisdictional overlap and you could be fined by either the City or the Province (Interior Health) or both.

Like most things to do with government, the regulations are complex and if you're unsure you can contact the Interior Health Tobacco Enforcement officer at: (250) 505-7210 or the City. Then again, why don't you just butt out because as Mary S. Ott says in Bartlett's Unfamiliar Quotations: “Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.”