Word: smokes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite such large-scale maneuvers, the real war over smoking is being fought in countless small skirmishes between recalcitrant puffers and touchy nonpuffers. The first escalation is verbal. Nonsmokers, who used to say mildly, "Would you mind not smoking?" have moved up to billingsgate. A woman trying to ban all smoking from airlines remarked, "I don't see why the nonsmokers should have their lungs raped." Action is sometimes not far behind. At a reception in the Minnesota Governor's mansion, a smoker who was asked to put out his cigarette cheerfully agreed, then made the mistake...
...home, the question for dedicated nonsmokers is whether to ask visitors not to smoke. Says an optimistic New Jersey housewife: "We figure that people who like and respect us won't offend us by smoking in our house." What about visitors who can't refrain? Rick and Debby Pabst of Buckley, Wash., put smoker friends out on the balcony. Says Rick: "We sit inside and talk through the door...
Smokers can take heart from the 300,000-member organization PUFF (People United to Fight Frustrations), founded last fall by Richard Arnold of Lubbock, Texas. Arnold, who owns two restaurants, gave up smoking three months ago, thinks the habit is harmful and recommends that smokers put out cigarettes "as a common courtesy" if the smoke is bothering anyone. He refuses donations from the tobacco industry because PUFF is not interested in promoting smoking, only the right to smoke...
Some observers believe that the smoking war cannot be understood without a bit of psychological insight. One is Manhattan Psychiatrist Samuel V. Dunkell, who sees the whole thing as struggle between macho and puritan impulses. Reformed smokers, he says, tend to be the most intractable opponents of the weed. "I've noticed when people stop smoking," he says, "that it's part of a calculated campaign of reform of the personality. They do it like a reformation in religious terms, and they feel that they have to convert others." A Tenafly, N.J., psychologist agrees...
...woman asked a pipe smoker to move downwind and seemed annoyed when he readily agreed to move. Then the wind shifted and blew a puff past her nose. "You goddam smokers!" the woman screamed. "I don't know how you do it, but you can even blow smoke against the wind...