By Kerri Havnen Gordon

When Peter Jennings died of lung cancer recently, it saddened me that cigarettes had claimed yet another victim. Like so many of his generation, he likely started smoking during the long era of the Marlboro Man.

For decades the Marlboro Man perpetuated the myth that smoking was a good thing. He sat on his horse out on the prairie and wore Levi’s, cowboy boots and a well-worn hat. A cigarette hung casually from his oh-so-cool lips. When people saw the Marlboro Man, they saw a sexy, rugged outdoorsman who was firmly in charge of his life. They didn’t think lung cancer. They didn’t think emphysema.

So when I learned in the 1970s that cigarettes caused both cancer and emphysema, diseases that had doomed both my grandmothers, I was alarmed because both my parents smoked. My dad, a three-pack-a day guy, seemed immune to my nagging, but I sensed my mom might quit if I pestered enough.

And so I pestered, incessantly, until she reached for her smokes one night between our games of double solitaire. Not another cigarette, I remember thinking, but instead of my usual hounding, I simply looked at her, imploring with my 11-year-old eyes to not light up. And then she shocked me.

My mild-mannered mother suddenly picked up her pack of Cools and flung it across the room. Looking a little crazed, she said, “Honey, I’m never going to smoke another cigarette again.” We sat there stunned for a moment, a little embarrassed by her outburst, but she was true to her word.

In the decades since then, with smoking finally falling out of national favor, the nonsmoking segment of our culture has become increasingly intolerant of other people’s smoking habits. The tobacco companies, however, continue to pander to our nation’s youth, and Hollywood is right there to help them do it. It’s amazing, really. We can ban cigarettes from the workplace and restaurants. We can forbid them on airplanes and even in bars, but we can’t seem to remove them from movie and television screens.

So it was refreshing when one of the newer Star Wars movies included a shifty alien who tried to sell Obi-Wan “death sticks.” The wise Obi-Wan performed mind control on the young urchin and told him, “You don’t want to sell me death sticks. You want to go home and rethink your life.” The message was clear: Avaricious people sell cigarettes and intelligent people eschew them.

This message, of course, is lost on the millions of young people who light that first cigarette and soon find themselves addicted. I imagine they think smoking makes them look cool, but it doesn’t. Perhaps they smoke because their friends do, or as an expression of defiance or independence.

Or perhaps, immortal creatures they think they are, they assume they are immune to smoke-related problems. I want to tell them that someday cigarettes will yellow their teeth, damage their heart and blacken their lungs. I want them to know that smoking will make their voices raspy and their breathing ragged.

I want them to consider that their secondhand smoke will repel, disgust and even sicken people they care about. I’d like them to ponder life with lung cancer or after a stroke or with an oxygen tank trailing behind them wherever they go. They should know, too, that most adult smokers regret ever puffing that first cigarette.

By the time the Marlboro Man succumbed to lung cancer in the 1990s, the cultural tide in America had turned against smoking. Unfortunately it was too late for Peter Jennings and many of his fellow smokers. Cigarettes kill, yet people still take up the habit. How sad.