LOUIS BURKE | Culture | CONTACT
A rare surviving soldier in the battle against nicotine has offered a message of hope to young vape conscripts by simply existing.
The baccy stained soldier is Desmond Toulie (73) of Betoota Ponds who over an evening at the Betoota Ponds Returned Soldiers and Conscription Club couldn’t help but get talking to the young people who had turned his old smoking section into the vaping section.
“Of course, back when I was your age it was all a smoking section, the whole world,” spouted Toulie, with a voice that lightly rattled like an empty tin of spray paint.
“To get fresh air you had to climb thirty metres up a ladder, or plippy poles as we called them back then, and inhale above all the smoke.”
Like many of his generation, Toulie was drawn in by the glamorous cigarette advertising that targeted the youth. However, unlike a lot of that generation, Touile is still here to talk about it.
And now, Toulie is seeing a new generation drawn in by a cool nicotine product used by all the celebrities and guaranteed to help you fit in, proving as a black and white meme featuring Mark Twain once said “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
For that reason, Toulie went over to a vaping gaggle of youths and informed them that quitting is possible, even if it takes 60 years like it did for him.
“And now I feel great! Apart from my knees. And shoulders. And back. And my dicky toe. Dicky finger. Most of my joints. My lungs.”
Although they appreciated the yarn in a ‘this will be a funny story later’ kind of way, the young people assured Toulie they would be fine as vaping is not as damaging as smoking as scientists really haven’t had time to figure it out yet.
