My son has an allergy problem: he’s allergic to peanuts. As he got older I taught him to read the labels of everything before he ate it. He became very good at this task; he read every label on everything.
It’s funny to watch him walk through the grocery store picking up cans of food, read it, and then set it down. Grab a frozen pizza, read it, then set it down, over and over the whole time were at the store. I never scold him for this because I feel that now he is so careful about what he eats that I’m not as worried about him getting sick.
The other day I was sitting in my lawn chair smoking a cigarette watching my son play in the back yard. He got tired and came sat next to me. We started talking about him joining the school baseball team. I was puffing on my cigarette as I talked being careful to blow the smoke away form my son. He reached over and grabbed my pack and turned it around, then he turned them round and around them he sat them down. He looked up at me and asked "why are there no ingredients on cigarettes?"
I looked at him, looked at the pack of cigarettes, picked it up and turned it around and then shook my head. "I don't know, son," I said. "It’s probably because they don’t want you to know what’s in them." Of course his response was “WHY?” I looked at him and said "wow, that’s a good question!"
So why doesn’t the government make cigarette manufactures put the ingredients on the labels?! My guess is that if they did, no one would smoke. That would cost them billions, maybe trillions of dollars a year in tax revenue.
As for me, now I’m on the patch and I haven’t smoked in three months. Thanks son.
