The WHO Has the Worst Holidays

It’s the internationally recognized No Tobacco Day, everyone! Or it’s “you don’t really need to quit until you’re thirty/pregnant/have difficulty climbing stairs” day, depending on whether you’re an Orthodox or Reform non-smoker.

If you are currently quitting (mazel tov!) the only people more miserable than you today are the tobacco executives. For their bummed-out internal memos on the subject, please feel free to peruse the official Tobacco Archives, which are sufficiently user-unfriendly to suggest that court-ordered transparency agreements are not the funnest part of Philip Morris’ day.

(Can you imagine if someone just INVENTED cigarettes tomorrow and applied for permission to sell them? The FDA thinks walnuts are a drug.)

Of course, cigarettes (and walnuts) will be banned as soon as the health care costs outweigh the tax revenues, which will never, ever, ever happen, even in nations with socialized medicine, because smokers perish relatively cheaply and with due haste and never bother anyone, unless they smoke in cars, which is gross. The jury is still out on eating California shelled walnuts while operating a motor vehicle.