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Hard Cases for a Handle Theory

Chalk, soap, cigarettes

By then she was a mother, with two young children, five and three; and though the decade hadn’t gotten around to worrying much about second-hand smoke, the older child, a son, hated the smell and complained steadily, especially in the closed quarters of the family car. SmokEnders got its start in 1969, and found a growing market as evidence of the risks of smoking mounted; the company hosted six-week seminars in hotel conference rooms and corporate campuses across the United States and Canada and beyond. Anyhow, one of SmokEnders’s techniques was to have participants take their final cigarette butts, as their habit tapered, and drop them in a mason jar of water, which would be left somewhere ready to hand, say on a shelf halfway down the stairs to the basement.

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