A Different Sign of the Times
It is a different day- especially if you are a smoker. (Disclaimer: I used to be a smoker but it will be 17 years cigarette free in February.) Indoor clean-air acts et. al. have caused a real shift. That was my thought as I walked by a high-end jewelery store the other day. It was a windy, cool, November day in Minnesota. There, just around the corner in the corner away from the wind, stood three workers from the jewelery store. Suits, ties, high-end people, smoking like outcasts.

Actually it is a sight that would have been unusual 15 - 20 years ago. If you would have told me then that this would happen I would have thought you were crazy. But now there are whole states that prohibit indoor smoking. It has taken a great deal of lobbying and voting and action. It has taken a major shift of thinking and probably a whole change of the paradigm of what is acceptable and where. But it has happened.

Which should give those of us who hope to do something about the alcohol and drug addiction problems a bit of a sense of hope. I'm fairly sure that the success will look a lot different than the tobacco change, but it is possible. Perhaps things like tougher enforcement of drunk driving laws or a more focused way of dealing with underage consumption will work. But in the end it will be as much about a change of perception, culture, and image as anything else.

As long as excessive drinking looks like fun, it will be more difficult to change. As long as uncontrolled drinking to excess is encouraged by a cultural ethos it will not change. But the change in tobacco usage and the now lowered acceptance of smoking as a "free-to-do-it-anywhere-I-want-to" activity gives hope that the extreme use of alcohol will one day be changed.

And with it the terrible costs to society in death, depression, violence, and plain old drunken behavior.