Let’s reuse a topic! That parks smoking ban idea never gets stale!
There is actually one aspect of the issue that’s been ignored. There’s a question on many people’s minds that certainly motivates some proponents of the smoking ban. Namely, why do homeless people smoke, anyway?
The thinking goes like this. “Homeless people are homeless because they can’t afford rent, right? But these smoking homeless people have money to buy cigarettes. So that’s money they should be saving for rent someplace. They aren’t saving that money, so they’re mismanaging their funds. So they deserve to be homeless.”
“They deserve to be homeless so they are bad people, because good people wouldn’t deserve to be homeless, which is a bad condition to be in. They’re bad people so they deserve to be booted out of parks, along with other bad people, like prostitutes and illegal immigrants and unattended juvenile delinquents.”
That is some fine twisted thinking, and I’m proud to have survived this long in a world where thinking like that passes for sane. But within this knotted mass of muddle are points that beg to be de-muddled. Let’s do that.
First, though, I want to talk about me. Me, the ex-smoker. I’ve been homeless four times for about a total of four years. The last time I was homeless ended in November of 1997. I quit smoking July 21, 1997. AHA! I’ve busted myself! I’m proof that if you quit you can get off the streets, right?
Wrong. I got off the streets because by July 21, 1997, I had already been on a waiting list for subsidized housing for 10 months, having been homeless for over a year, and the housing simply came available four months later, as it would have anyway.
OK, but why was I smoking at all? Why wasn’t I socking all that money away for first, last and deposit for the apartment of my dreams?
Well, it wasn’t really practical. While cigarettes were expensive, so were apartments, and the market cost of the latter was about three times that of the former. Today, it’s worse, more like five times. But there were a couple of other financial considerations that made cigarettes the better investment.
They’re an appetite suppressant. So every cigarette could ease me through another day of malnutrition. One pack, stretched out over 12 hours, could get me through with just one can of cold raviolis and a cheeseburger. No pack, and I’d need the can of cold ravioli, a cheeseburger, two more cheeseburgers, a ham and three-cheese omelet with hash browns, sausage and toast and a Ding Dong at the end of the day.
They’re also an entertainment-need suppressant. By entertainment, I’m speaking loosely. I don’t just mean movies and dinner theater, football games and playing scrabble and energetic rolling in the grass with puppies. I am alluding to social entertainment. I’m talking about the beings you’re oriented toward if you have an orientation.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Regardless, cigarettes exist to suck on. When you’re homeless, you’re bedless. When you’re bedless, you’re partnerless. A cigarette is a friend who understands.
So what really happened July 21, 1997, was that I turned in my cigarettes for a woman who had her own bed. That was my experience. My experience doesn’t generalize!
We can’t solve homelessness that way, people. We can’t tell all the heterosexual homeless men smoking in parks that if they quit smoking, we’ll give them a woman tomorrow and subsidized housing in four months. Life doesn’t work that way.
Even today, cigarettes cost way less than market housing, they’re horribly addictive, and they can ease the grinding day-to-day psychological struggle of homelessness while taking the edge off the physical discomfort.
People say, “I don’t need drugs, I get high on life,” as if that’s an answer to drug users and why they shouldn’t use drugs. The question is: Why are so few able to live the kind of lives they could get high on?
Sound off to Dr. Wes: [email protected]