Road Apples
Aug. 3, 2009

When prohibition is doomed to fail

By Tim Sanders

Over the past few years, the American scientific community (which I believe is located just north of Bowling Green, Kentucky) has been obsessed with doing something or other about cigarette smoking and obesity among America’s young people. There have been several proposals, most of which involve either taxing cigarettes, soft drinks, and sugary snacks out of existence, or simply prohibiting their consumption in public, under penalty of imprisonment (the imprisonment option was quickly discarded, since prisoners are guaranteed basic human needs like the right to cigarettes and sugary snacks, along with cable TV, Internet access, Flamenco lessons, and cosmetic surgery, in Article 36, Subsection 14, Addendum 962 of the U.S. Constitution).

But nobody wants to address the real root of the problem, which is ... PARENTS. Let me explain.

When I was a kid, most folks understood that until children reached a certain age (usually around 35), they considered parents their natural enemies. That was because the dopey idea of “parents as buddies” had yet to infest our culture. All of my friends and I knew that if there was something our parents wanted us to avoid, it was probably a very enjoyable enterprise. My parents, for example, did not smoke. Not only did they not smoke, they explained to me that were I to smoke cigarettes my growth would be stunted, my airways would collapse, and when at age twelve I lay in that iron lung, gasping my last, nobody would visit me and soothe my fevered brow because I would stink like a smoked herring. This, quite naturally, made me suspect that there must be something very gratifying about smoking. After all, my parents were also dead set against my staying up late, perusing the “articles” in the Playboy magazine down at the barber shop, and throwing rocks at street lights, all of which seemed like perfectly reasonable activities to me.

So because smoking was forbidden, I naturally wanted to smoke. Many of my buddies were under similar restrictions, so every chance we got we’d borrow a pack of cigarettes carelessly left lying in plain sight in the closet in somebody’s father’s jacket pocket, and sneak off to smoke half a pack. None of the cigarettes I smoked in later life were ever as satisfying as those early, stolen cigarettes, inhaled with careless abandon while we walked down the railroad tracks, or puffed furtively while we hid behind a neighbor’s garage. When I went off to college I began smoking in earnest, and continued for the next twenty years.

Another attraction to forbidden fruit, or more precisely forbidden sugary snacks, began when I was first diagnosed as diabetic at age eleven. Until that time I had no more interest in Milky Ways and Zagnuts than the average non-diabetic. But when I was told that above all else I must monitor my caloric intake and avoid sweets, those prohibitions made the sugary snacks very appealing to me. Whenever I walked past Brog’s candy store, strategically situated half a block from the school, the glucose-laden chorus of Goo Goo Clusters, Jujubes, Milk Duds, Slo Pokes, Sugar Babies, Sweet Tarts, Walnettos, Zotz and Wax Lips would all sing their seductive Siren song and lure me to that deadly candy counter.

On the other hand, my parents encouraged me to eat green, leafy vegetables, which Mom assured me were good for me. “Here, Tim,” she’d say at the dinner table, smiling sweetly, “have some more greens. They have no calories, and you can have all you want.” And of course to this Dad would often add that note of encouragement that no eleven-year-old with a vivid visual imagination could ever resist: “AND THEY’RE GOOD FOR YOUR BOWELS!” All of this, of course, resulted in me bolting from the table and galloping to my room to search for the Zero bar I’d hidden in my sock drawer, or better yet for that half a Marlboro I’d stashed in the finger of my baseball mitt.

My point is that had my parents been less diligent, I would have grown into a better man. I’m not saying they should have filled each and every one of my cranial orifices–my mouth, both nostrils, and both ears–with smoldering cigarettes, from the time I was old enough to toddle around the house, and then followed me around with a Zippo to make sure I never went out. That would have been silly, and I’d have set the curtains on fire in a nanosecond.

But then again, had they done so, by the time I was old enough to leave the house on my own, those stinking cigarettes would have been tossed into the bushes, along with those stupid winter buckle boots I hated to wear when I walked to school. Once in college, I’d have firmly established my manly independence by never, ever smoking another cigarette.

And as to diet, had my parents constantly pushed plates full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Tootsie Rolls at me during dinner, with Dad extolling their bowel-related virtues, I’d have avoided those sugary snacks like the plague. And had they made a point of forbidding me to eat vegetables under any circumstances, and had the good people at Keegstra’s IGA store only had the good sense to put their vegetables into shiny foil packages and give them catchy names, I’d have enjoyed nothing better than sneaking off to the railroad tracks to munch some sinfully delectable Broc-o-Bit Broccoli Nuggets and Atomic Asparagus Spears.

So parents, if you want your tubby little fourteen-year-old to give up his Hostess Ding Dongs and Winstons, you’ll have to be smarter than he is. Force feed him two dozen Bavarian Cream Dunkin’ Donuts daily, and furnish him with several boxes of big, fat, 60 ring gauge, hand rolled Cuban crafted cigars each week. In a few months things will be much different. You’ll be broke, and when that happens he’ll be unable to afford his bad habits.

Yeah, I could be wrong, but that's my theory, and I’m sticking to it.