I started smoking when I wasn’t quite fourteen and puffed cigarettes for twenty years. I finally quit just months after finding out I was HIV positive because studies showed smoking was linked with faster progression of HIV disease to Aids. I grew up in southern Virginia tobacco country. The small, enterprising town of South Hill was the third largest tobacco market in the state with five huge competing warehouses. Farmers from surrounding counties who were luckily enough to have government allocated rights to raise a few acres of the valuable crop brought their flue-cured tobacco to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Their bundled and graded golden brown leaf was then shipped off to Richmond for manufacturing into cigarettes in the factories lining the bluffs above the James River. Queen Elizabeth’s friend Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the Virginia Indian habit of smoking tobacco in long clay pipes to London about 1600. Much to the annoyance of the social critics of the day,...