smoking;; Mark Morford

ESSENTIAL Mark Morford columns:

Give It Up, Smoker 08.April.09
Death, cancer, rotted teeth, emphysema won't do it, but 62 cents will?

and his earlier (2005) column of the same topic:
Dead People Smoke Camels
Quit smoking the EZ way! Pop this new drug, ignore your real issues. God bless America.

It seems obvious but it bears repeating: magic-bullet drugs do nothing. They do nothing to help you change a thing about your addictive tendencies or your attitude or your lifestyle, do nothing to induce any sort of increase in your understanding of how the body works and how the spirit is screaming for attention and just why the hell you might be so easily prone to addiction in the first place. Such prescription drugs don't educate. They don't invoke change. They just numb.

But hell, who cares? Why examine causes? Why try to figure out the reasons behind our toxic tendencies and our weird obsession with things we know are killing us? Simply bomb the problem into submission, and then pretend it's not still right there, simmering just underneath, even nastier and more fanged than before and just aching to manifest itself in some other form. Ain't that America? You're goddamn right it is.

Fuckhell, Mark is still confined to SFgate.com, totally need to get him back in print again! I would cut out his columns and paste them on my walls.

I even agree on the current position of those anti-gay-marriage organization he presented in his most recent column:

Fear the rainbow!
A storm is gathering. Are you afraid, Christian? Are you afraid *enough*?

Mark Morford is such a liberal pagan, and such an obscenely great writer. He has this like unitarian pagan sort of everything is god, we are god, god is a she, buddha, allah, whatever, I dunno worldview. He's crazy. But crazy good. Brings out the truth in his columns, and that's what counts most. Though I don't share and support his worldview, the stuff he writes about are on-point. Read his columns and get addicted.