Imagine yourself sitting on a barstool with a vodka martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other looking so darn cool. Between seductive sips you take a long hard drag and blow perfectly shaped smoke rings into the air. Everybody's watching you, especially that hottie you've been eyeing all night. You feel empowered. Others light up and try but no one can blow like you. You're a celebrity. That cigarette is your ticket to not going home alone.

That cigarette could also be your ticket straight to an oxygen tank in ten, twenty or thirty years. Suddenly it doesn't sound so cool, does it?

It's amazing how we associate cigarettes with "coolness" and "glamour" and "sex." They've been marketed to us like that for years and we've bought right into it, becoming addicted to the myth as well as the nicotine.

It's sad to report that lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for men and women, and over 80 percent of lung cancers are thought to be directly related to smoking. Cough, cough, is that phlegm we hear rumbling in your tar stained lungs?

This year November 20th is designated the Great American Smoke Out, a day when smokers are encouraged to not light up, to quit smoking. It all began in 1971 in Randolph, MA when Arthur P. Mullaney asked people to give up cigarettes for a day and donate their daily cigarette money to a high school scholarship fund. His good deed caught on and by 1977 the American Cancer Society made the Great American Smoke Out a national day.