A Change is Gonna Come: the Growing Tidal Wave of Alcoholic Understanding.

I smoked cigarettes for a good portion of the 1990s.

I started smoking when I got to college and found that many of the new friends I was making fashionably paired tobacco with alcohol. I wore faded jeans with an old T-shirt most days, and showered and shaved rarely. I paid five dollars for a haircut from a woman who lived in my building every few months, and I gained 40 pounds from beer and pizza my freshman year. Smoking and drinking were the only fashionable things I did back then.

I can remember walking through the mall smoking cigarettes with my college buddies. I was always on the lookout for my mom’s friends. I didn’t want them to see me smoking and report back to my parents. I was in my 20s at the time, and fully capable of making my own bad life choices, but I didn’t want to worry them. Even more than that, I didn’t want my parents to think badly of me because we all knew smoking led to cancer. It might have still been fashionable to the beer swillers on college campuses across the country, but smoking was right on the cusp of becoming socially exiled behavior.

Twenty years ago, we were smoking in public places -not just bars, but malls and theaters and lots of indoor areas where we all shared recycled air. Smoking was…