Gone The Way Of The Buggy Whip?

I walked down to the Post Office again today, mailing more queries for our children's book , and even though there are many vacant or half-vacant buildings along the way my path does take me right past the Screen Actor's Guild offices. As I mentioned before, for some reason actors smoke in a greater proportion than the rest of the population. Except maybe North Carolina. And since many SAG employees are also actors, many of the people working in the SAG offices smoke. That's the transitive property you learned in Algebra I, if A=C and B=C, then A=C. And you thought you'd never use that in real life…
   I passed the SAG offices at 12:30 PM, smack in the middle of lunch by anyone's reckoning. I caught a face full of some chick's exhaled Marlboro, and then got a snootful of another person's noxious vapors before I realized what was going on. Stationed every four or five feet along the entire length of the building were people driving another nail before their lunch hour ended. I counted eight people and I'd already passed two or three with more around the corner. They all stared at the sidewalk, or at the plants in the planter, ashamed of their dependence and yet powerless to resist its pull. People who want to light up are relegated to the fringes – literally – forced to indulge their addiction in alcoves and behind dumpsters, out in the heat of summer and the cold of winter.
   So why don't more of them quit?
   Easy for me to say, I'm don't have a two-pack a day habit. One of my friends has been 'quitting' for years now, using every method that comes along, and he's just not up to the task. But my mother quit, decades ago, and my father quit not too long after she did. And this was before nicotine gum or recovery programs or anything. Back then if you wanted to quit you were on your own, and you'd have people bumming your Green Stamps off of you so they could get a windbreaker or Coleman stove. Quitting can be done.
   For that matter, why do people ever start smoking nowadays? It's not like the message isn't clear or hasn't been repeated over and over and over again. Kind of like telling people not to poke sharp sticks in their eyes, it's not really anything you think a sane person would do in the first place. But people do. Why aren't cigarettes going the way of the buggy whip*? Once plentiful but now confined to museums and images of Rod Serling on Twilight Zone.

*   kids, a buggy whip is not some hip young dessert topping** it was an implement drovers used to urge their animals forward. If you don't know what a drover is, look it up.

**    many thanks to Henny Youngman, may he rest in peace, for that fossil of a joke