I was born in the early 1950’s, 53 to be exact. I am now 59 about to turn 60. Both my parents smoked and as a child it seemed a normal part of life. Smoking was always what the grown-ups did. I’d be at the grocery store in line with my Dad, and he’d be writing in his checkbook, to buy the groceries, with a cigarette dangling out his mouth, even ashes falling on the check-out stand. Everyone smiling, no problem. When I was 12, the kids which some were older by a year or so that lived in the neighborhood, thought it would be cool if we all were to smoke. So, we did and we would walk a few blocks in the Valley of San Franando, to the closest gas station and buy cigarettes for a 25 cents a pack. I didn’t get the feeling that any of us thought we were doing anything all that wrong. We were trying to look and feel grown up around the puberty age. Guess from what I’ve read that’s somewhat normal and what most adolescents do. Mimmicking what most our heros (our parents) were doing, seemed like the best thing to do. A year later after a divorce and moving to a new school district, I was still smoking. In fact, I think I was about up to 1/2 a pack a day, and I was also a bit bad, taking some change fom my Father’s dresser to buy my daily cigarettes. I was obviously already addicted at 13 years of age. The following year after bankruptcy court, my Dad gave up out of disgust, trying to be single Father to two daughters with so much financial ruin on top of everything else. So, his mind was open to trying new things, after all it was 1967, the Summer of Love, in Hollywood, Calif. and he heard about a live-in drug and alcohol detox community called Synanon, located on the beach in an old converted mansion. They had what was called a Square Residence program for people with other issues, and so meeting their criteria, we moved in. My Father, myself and younger sister by 20 months. At first while in Synanon, in the open community areas, I was smoking it seemed everyone had turned a blind eye to my smoking which was now up to a pack a day. Fourteen a Father, and no Mother, due to her unfortunately developing severe mental illness, when I had just turned six. She was an absent parent from age 6 to 15. In those days the late 50’s early 60’s, a nervous breakdown could mean a lengthy state hospital stay, similar to being incarcerated. I was a very grown up 14 year old. I was unprotected from my own choice making, and the values of the elders weren’t Donna Reed. I was well into my addiction to nicotine, on a path, unhindered until…. Synanon, was being pressured by social service groups, about keeping school aged children out of the public school system. So they shipped my sister and myself to Santa Monica Jr. High by Jitney a van, a mile away. The scholl was 99% African American, and that was quite an experience, when most African Americans, seemed to be angry with society bearing the brunt of all the injustices that their American Slave ancestors had endured, with and remnants of the same injustices were still visited upon that struggling culture. It was odd to be disliked for being white, but it was something I had compassion for, being that my family was Jewish and also, did not appreciate any form of racism or victimization of minority ethnicity.