Et puis je fume
By The official video for Sympathique will not embed but is worth the click.
Back to news about the study that shows poverty is bad for people; This makes sense to me.
It is hard to point to one overriding cause,
(If one chinstrokes one’s way past the fact being poor ranges from gawdawful to living hell, but to continue:)
but public health researchers have a few answers. In recent decades, smoking, the single biggest cause of preventable death, has helped drive the disparity, said Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the rich and educated began to drop the habit, its deadly effects fell increasingly on poorer, uneducated people. Mr. Fenelon has calculated that smoking accounted for a third to a fifth of the gap in life expectancy between men with college degrees and men with only high school degrees. For women it was as much as a quarter.
That is, the fact that poor people continue to smoke even as more non-poor people quit makes sense to me.
Beyond the fact that smoking is addictive as hell, the connection between poverty and unhealthy behaviors such as smoking is well established. That poverty is linked to depression and anxiety should surprise only those whose exposure to poor people comes through such shows as Good Times. Smoking is also linked with depression.
Like I said, it makes perfect sense that poor people aren’t quitting as rapidly (or successfully) as people who are not poor.
To expect otherwise is like expecting a man who lives in a food desert to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables because after all, the county spent all that money on billboards and PSAs telling him the importance of a healthy diet!
Pphhhhbbbbt.
