I grew up in a household full of smokers. Both my mother and my father smoked cigarettes, basically for as long as I can remember, as did my grandparents, my uncles and most of my aunts. My childhood is chock full of smokey memories, from looking down the basement stairs and into a floating blue haze that resembled something out of Alien, to our constant road trips that ended in nausea and blinding relief to be out of the car. For my entire life I’ve been surrounded by smokers, by smoke, by cigarettes, and so I’ve also been bombarded constantly by the concept, theory and practice of Second Hand Smoke.

Like basically anyone who was born since 1970, I’ve had several major health problems diagnosed already, and I’ve probably got countless more that are waiting in the wings — I wouldn’t know, since I stopped going to the doctor when he started prescribing medication whose individual doses cost more than I made in an entire day’s work. I’m asthmatic, I’m allergic to everything that produces pollen and several dozen things that don’t, I’ve got migraine headaches, and I’m insane enough to think that writing a funny webpage will make me famous. None of these afflictions have much in common, except that they’re all basically incurable, and that at one time or another the blame for all of them has been handed to the mysterious, insidious evil of Second Hand Smoke.

“Your parents smoke?” I’ve been asked, in naked horror. “Don’t you make them go outside or something?”

“Uh,” I replied. “Of their own house?”

“Uh, yeah! You could die of Second Hand Smoke!”

“Or I could die of Mad Parents. I prefer the slower, Carolina-flavored fate, if it’s all the same.”

I actually tried smoking exactly once, when I was about eight years old. I followed my older neighbor and a couple of other kids in the neighborhood down into an overgrown creek that ran behind the local high school, there to receive a lesson in the features, benefits and fabulous dividends of lighting and inhaling from cigarettes. I was fiercely determined, despite my inability to breathe especially well when there was just regular air in my lungs, not to be a wuss, and so took my opportunity to smoke as a very serious one. I watched my neighbor intently as he showed us how to properly flick the lighter, bring the flame close to our faces, and draw the flame into the end of the cigarette by inhaling through it. I imitated him almost mechanically, and actually had more trouble with getting the lighter to catch than with actually drawing a puff.

It tasted like burning paper, though. I remember thinking that I must have done something wrong, because I wasn’t tasting anything but the burning cigarette paper, and I really thought that it should be different from that. It didn’t though, no matter how deeply I puffed and no matter how much my tongue swelled up, and so I was left sort of mystified by the whole thing. I sat down in the grass and coughed for a while afterwards, having given up only halfway through the cigarette, and when I found out a few years later that I was also allergic to cigarette smoke, I wasn’t altogether surprised.

That was it, really. Nothing else was a motivating factor for me, except for the fact that all the other kids were doing it at that very second, and I didn’t want to look like the big suck. Before and afterwards, I had plenty of chances to rip off cigarettes from my parents if I had wanted to — they smoked them at a swift enough rate that one here or there wouldn’t have been missed — but it just wasn’t a burning desire in my heart. I didn’t especially care. It was nothing exotic; it was just what my parents did, about as much of a forbidden pleasure as reading spy novels or watching curling on Sundays.

How could I have known that they were murdering me?

Apparently, all this time that my parents have been murdering themselves — according to the anti-smoking commercials that I’ve been watching since G.I. Joe was on the air — they’ve also been slyly murdering me as well, making for the first two steps in some kind of criminal, mass-murdering hat-trick. I can only think that as a finale, they plan to douse themselves with kerosene and light the entire neighborhood on fire, so that the smoke from that can float out over the high school and murder everyone there, as well. Thanks to recent advertising, paid for in part by my very own tax dollars, I’ve discovered that smokers are not only crazed suicidal freaks — as was never so clearly articulated as when Elvis Stojko said, “I gave my life to skating, not to smoking,” presumably implying that he’d rather die of figure skating than cigarettes — but also that they are crazed homicidal freaks, whose eventually-lethal Second Hand Smoke threatens to gradually destroy all those near them.

As I’ve said before, the concept of Second Hand Smoke is nothing new to me, but it had always been presented as nothing more than a by-product of being around smokers. And more to the point, it was always discussed as sort of a secondary consideration when doctors were trying to talk smokers into quitting, to introduce a moral dimension into the argument. If a smoker couldn’t be talked into quitting for their own health, why, then would they at least not think of those around them? Surely they must realize all that cigarette smoke doesn’t disappear! Surely they must know that it flows straight into the lungs of little Tyler or tender Hayley? Shouldn’t they quit, if only to protect the young? Surely, they must think of the children?

I always kind of got the feeling that Second Hand Smoke was an environmentalist angle that got applied to smokers, with considerably more successful results. If polluters can’t be convinced that cleaning up is the best thing for their own benefit, then they might at least acknowledge that it’s best for the greater good; if smokers can’t be convinced to keep themselves from dying, they might at least bend when it comes to the demise of their own children. Of course, we still do live in an age where the occasional river or lake bursts into flames all by itself, and where parents are more interested in banning books than teaching kids to read them, so what’s to be done?

Here in Canada, our government has undertaken a number of initiatives to protect Canadians from themselves. These include:

1. banning smoking from every public place aside from small, encased areas of restaurants and bars,
2. taxing cigarettes to the extent that their price rivals other luxury items, such as car payments or satellite TV, and
3. applying that tax money to 30-second edu-drama-tainment pieces on television.

This last endeavor seems to reinforce the notion that the anti-smoking movement is following an environmentalist path. What do you do after you fail to convince the polluter that you’re right? Convince the world that the polluter is wrong.

And so we come to the recent and colorful ongoing ads from Health Canada’s Go Smoke Free campaigns, which take a big and aggressive step from campaigning to smokers against smoking, to campaigning to the world against smokers. And not just any kind of smokers, mind you, but smokers who are deliberately dragging you down into the yawning pits of Hell with them, whether you want them to or not.

I can’t think of anything more persuasive, can you? Let’s take a look!

I’m not sure which ad I learned more from — the one that taught me how asthma is a sexually-transmitted disease, or the one that showed me how parents are specifically targeting their children with second hand smoke. Either way, I certainly loathe and despise smokers now more than I ever did, so I believe my government’s mission has been accomplished. I mean, it was one thing to shake my head sadly while I watched old people talk about their husbands or wives dying of things, but it’s altogether another to realize that they could kill me at any time.

And all it took was a little shift in advertising, moving smokers out from the “They Should Know Better” category, and into the “Their Bad Habits Could Kill You One Day” realm, along with drunk drivers and bioterrorists. Still, now that I’ve seen the light, I’m concerned that these ads are too subtle. There might be some who see these ads who might not understand that — contrary to common sense — they are entitled to help other people decide whether they’re allowed to smoke or not. So, I’ve come up with a proposed ad of my own, which should hopefully help drive the message home.

Too soft, I know. I’ll never have a future in government.