I remember a man who told my ex-girlfriend and I when we were shopping, about how his only problem was, he did what the Army told him to do. They put a cigarette in his ration pack and told him to smoke it. He's not entirely correct in that it wasn't the case that a commanding officer said, "Gentlemen, light your cigarettes." What happened was, if you were feeling anxious, colleagues or senior soldiers would give you a cigarette and say, "Here, have a puff on this. It'll calm you down."

I remember a short passage from Mama's Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird, when Adrian Talbot tells his daughter, "Sarah, I have cancer." "But you don't smoke." Mom and Dad both laughed. "That's lung cancer." At the time that book was written, it was generally assumed that cigarettes caused lung cancer, but we now know that smoking can contribute to heart disease, throat cancer, bladder cancer, penile cancer, kidney cancer and peripheral vascular disease.

Knowledge of autism can be related to knowledge of the effects of smoking. It broadens.

My take on Hans Asperger is somewhat similar to the attitudes of the Allied Powers towards Unit 731 (biological and chemical warfare) and other scientific discoveries. Hans Asperger himself was a bad man, BUT, some of his discoveries, had they been put to good use (i.e. rather than saving some children from the extermination camps because they may have been of some use to the Nazi Regime, seeing if their talents could be nurtured for humanity, instead) by the Allies, could have made the lives of autistic kids easier.

Autistic people have always existed, but we have been put aside. I remember, when I was in Year Two, my teacher, concerned about my progress, suggested to my mother that I be evaluated. I saw a neurologist who told my mother that I had muscular dystrophy and wouldn't live to be twelve. Well, I'm nearly four times that age, now, and his diagnosis was incorrect. It would be another 29 years before I would receive an accurate diagnosis.