Bad Habits Die Hard. Living Healthy Is Harder

Do you ever concentrate on TV commercials, especially the ones that guarantee you'll have an entire new outlook on life? You'll break the chains of bondage that have kept you shackled since the Beatles where churning out hit after hit. Of course, I refer to 'smoking' cigs. When I started they were forty cents a pack. I was like everyone else who began, didn't know or care about addiction. I used to have two a day watching the TV show, Cheyenne, in the afternoon. I was nineteen or twenty.
From then on, 1966 to 2010 I've consumed about----get out a calculator will ya'----20 a day for 365 days times forty-four years. Today, I think, ciggies cost a college education for one year. I see the tobacco producers have come out with cigarettes in miniature form that cost about $2.50 less a pack which go for, what, $6 bucks. That length of smoke would have been good for me in later life since I took five or six puffs then threw them away. In my youth I sucked the nicotine down to my lower rectum and beyond. I was a real man then.
But, I digress. Last evening I concentrated on what this particular commercial was actually saying and my ears perked when the side effects were listed. Have you ever noticed when these are said the announcer speeds up his speech pattern like his bladder was overflowing and he had to get to the 'john' before he wet his pants?
I've enclosed a list of these effects for one of the most popular anti-smoking drugs:

insomnia, loss of taste, menstrual disturbances, increased frequency of urination, abnormal dreams, constipation, flatulence, vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, anemia and lymph node enlargement, chest pain, palpitations, ringing in the ears, dry eyes, conjunctivitis, joint pain, cramps, disturbance in attention, dizziness, anxiety, depression, irritability and restlessness, and suicidal thoughts.

Break these down on an individual basis. Pretend you happen to be at Will and Kate's wedding reception. You are talking to a potentate. Then you start asking yourself, "will I have flatulence? How much? Will it come out like a whoopee cushion of one atomic bomb"? And that's just ONE of these things.
Do ya' still want to stay at the party or slit your throat in the back yard and fall into the moat?

Yeah right, I'm taking that drug AND while you're here you can cut off both of my legs and arms, too. If I had to go through all that why not put me in a self-induced coma for thirty days. It'd be a lot less trouble and I wouldn't have to be in court for murdering half of Dublin, Ohio out of frustration.