True fact: When I was in high school, my father told me (rather arrogantly, seventeen-year-old Me thought) that he was certain I wouldn’t smoke pot.

This was insane, of course. I grew up in the 1970’s, and I had certainly been exposed to weed by then. I couldn’t afford any, but boy, if I had been able to….I probably would have been too much of a weenie to buy it. That looked dangerous.

But here’s a note to kids: when your parent says something like that to you, the right thing to do is to say, “Why, of course I wouldn’t! What right-thinking American kid would do such a Commie thing?”

But when you’re a self-absorbed seventeen-year-old with delusions of grandeur, you open your fool mouth and say, “What makes you think that?”

And your dad says, “Because you don’t smoke cigarettes.” His reasoning was that, if I don’t tolerate cigarette smoking, I’m not going to be able to handle the more intense smoking and inhalation of pot.

And then SASYO retorts, because your need to have your parents be wrong is much more important than your need for self-preservation, “Oh yeah? I can smoke a cigarette.”

And then Dad, who has been smoking since he was ten, whips out a KOOL and invites you to fire one up. And SASYO, again proving how idiotic hormones make teenagers because all you want to do is PROVE you could, in fact, be smoking doobies every fifteen minutes, takes the cigarette, fires it up, takes a big drag, and promptly pukes all over the kitchen.

Needless to say, I was raised differently than most kids. And for someone who really has never smoked cigarettes, I find myself defending smokers an awful lot.

I was struck the other day by this story, which basically covers the decline of smoking in movies, and how the CDC is doing the happy dance because we’ve really cut down the number of ‘smoking impressions’ people get at the theater, and they really want any movie that contains cigarettes to be rated R so they’re still kinda sad because that hasn’t happened yet.

And I really, really hate this. Yes: smoking is a pretty stupid, smelly, dangerous habit. (I don’t even understand it, really. At least if I was smoking pot I would be mellow and happy; cigarettes don’t do anything but make you addicted to them and horribly anxious if you don’t have one and then they kill you. I thought bad habits were supposed to be fun while they were killing you.)

But I am appalled at the line of reasoning used here by the CDC and the number of people who endorse it. Using this logic, we should never show illegal drug use, prostitution, extramarital affairs, or any other irresponsible behavior in a movie that a kid could see because OMG they might think the movie glamorizes it and OMG then they’ll be more likely to do it.

And I really, really, REALLY am appalled at the little sub-movement that does things like insist that, if you publish a picture today of an old movie star who, when the picture was taken happened to be holding a cigarette, you should edit the cigarette out of the picture.

Because changing the account of history changes what really happened. Because no one has the sense to look at a cigarette and say, “Wow, remember when people smoked all the time?” without also thinking, “DAMN. That makes me want to take up a pernicious, smelly habit that will ultimately require me to drag an oxygen tank around with me.” And because we should do whatever it takes to save people from themselves, no matter what the cost.

And because we should pretend that everything’s perfect and that everyone makes perfect decisions because that will increase the chance that everyone will, in fact, make perfect decisions, when in fact all that pretending will only reduce the likelihood that anyone will ever learn from anyone’s mistakes.

You want an anti-smoking ad that is real and more effective than trying to pretend that cigarettes don’t exist? Try this one: