Poor White Smoker Trash

Today I was waiting on the corner of Broadway and Commercial Drive in my dear city of Vancouver for one of my clients.  It seemed I was constantly dodging having to inhale second hand smoke.  Everywhere I looked there was someone pulling on a cigarette.  They weren't all white.  Some looked aboriginal or perhaps Latino or Filipino.  They all looked poor, even the ones decently dressed wore proudly their budget threads purchased brand new from Wall Mart or second hand from Value Village.

Now before any of you start yelling "classist" or "elitist" or other flattering and carefully thought out titles please consider this.  I am also poor.  And I buy my clothes at Value Village.  I would not be caught dead in a Wall Mart and instead of telling you why here let's just save that theme for a future post.  No promises.

Speaking of Commercial Drive, the intersection with Broadway at the Broadway Station for the Skytrain has nothing to do with the hip, radical, sexy, anarchist, and rapidly gentrifying 'hood just a few blocks to the north, also known as "The Drive."  The Broadway end of Commercial Drive, perhaps more accurately, the South End of the Drive, is just that.  I call it the Trailer Park end of the Drive.  A poor hardscrabble neighbourhood with very little character and quite a few gang members and street people.  Most of them are, or appear to be, smokers.

I just did a little Google search and while there is a bit of a consensus that people with lower education levels and who live on low incomes are more likely to smoke than others in Canada it is difficult to verify this and the findings do not appear to be consistent in the articles I have glanced at and one page was absolutely indecipherable.  Also it appears that young people in their twenties and thirties are still the largest demographic for cigarette smoking regardless their income or education level which simply reinforces the truism about the reckless and self-destructive stupidity of young people.

What I find puzzling and sad is that so many poor people still smoke.  If you are subsisting on minimum wage, or welfare or a disability pension and you have a pack a day habit this is going to set you back by nearly $400 a month.  If you are eking out an existence on between $610 and $1500 a month then this is going to be problematic.

I often notice panhandlers (beggars) smoking on the sidewalk.  On principal I never give money to them, operating on the assumption that my hard earned money (I earn a whopping twelve bucks an hour myself!) should not go directly into somebody's lungs. 

Despite one's lack of resources having an addiction makes one incredibly resourceful when it comes to getting a fix.  The poorest people on the street simply scavenge cigarette butts from the pavement and if they are still smouldering some think nothing of getting the last two or three blissful drags from someone else's cigarette, even if it has just been sitting in dog shit.  Or they bum or scam smokes off of strangers, lend them or sell them to each other, buy illegal cigarettes at a huge discount...

It is often impossible to engage a lot of these people, especially if they are older and have long standing mental health challenges, to quit smoking.  This is their way of coping.  If you have been poor all your life and have had to dedicate all your energy to simple basic survival because of a lack of education, decent employment, opportunities and connections, you are not going to readily abandon your single source of comfort.  And if you are under constant stress to survive or if you smoke to self-medicate because of psychosis that little compulsive nicotine rush is going to be your one and only mother lode of comfort.

I would love to see everyone quit smoking.  I would love to see Big Tobacco reduced to the gutter.  I am also waiting for the manifestation of the New Jerusalem.