Smoking is a sign of homicidal brutishness and/or suicidal tendencies. I have no problem with people on the whole choosing to live their lives in ways that will see them die earlier. But I do care if I have to pay for their medical treatment, or if they blow their poison in the air that I, or the people I care for, breathe.
Smoking cigarettes is a hollow, pointless, destructive habit, a behavioral/chemical addiction that fills one’s lungs – and the surrounding air – with crap.
It’s as insidious as a mosquito sting, only the sting takes place inside the smoker, and it’s not one sting but millions, one for each alveolus – a lungful of disease carrying stings working their way through the body.
It’s as useless and sick as a McDonalds meal – a minute of yum-yumm! followed by hours of disgusting aftereffects.
One is a fool to smoke cigarettes. We ought to know better. Let’s die from something filthy but inevitable, like car pollution, or heavy metals in tasty fish, and stress, stuff we won’t be rid of in our lifetimes.
Let’s die from fun shit, like alcohol, which gives you a buzz, or drugs, which get you high, or high speed (car, bike, downhill bicycle, skydiving) and generally anything that contributes to your frame of mind / state of cool.
Not from sucking on a useless stick.
I understand that the pollution and alcohol and drugs and speed parts may have confused you – sarcasm is a bastard – so let me elaborate.
- I despise cigarettes.
- I respect people’s right to smoke in their private residence and in venues that have a smoking license.
- I hate places that don’t adopt smoking restrictions to protect non-smokers.
- I hate it when people smoke in designated non-smoking venues
- I hate places that adopt non-smoking laws only to then allow people to break them. It adds insult to injury.
- There are far worse things to human health than smoking. But that doesn’t mean one should keep on smoking.
- Tar is a really shitty thing to suck on.
- Survival of the fittest will see to it that smoking is eradicated.
Here’s what I suggest:
If you know that it’s harmful AND useless, then use it only in the vicinity of those who enjoy it and/or partake in it.
Also, public health systems should be subsidized by smoking taxes or levies (turn the inelastic demand from this profit-making industry for the government to a fund that sustains the medication and treatment smokers need down the line). Insurance companies should raise their premiums on all smokers.
Conclusion: One of the ways to measure civilization is by the rules we apply to safeguard our health, progress, and prosperity. We also need to take risks, otherwise nothing would get done, so we have to counterweigh danger with reward (we do this in heavy construction, space exploration, endurance training and other demanding activities.) But smoking? Die from puffing on a leaf laced with carcinogenic additives? Seriously?
Our addiction to smoking is dire news for nearly the entire globe. We’re vested in technology that is harmful to our surrounding environment and ourselves, meaning we have to suffer pollution, but smoking is the litmus test that identifies the truly pathetic in us. Progress is a global construct that can’t be deconstructed willy-nilly. But smoking can – terminated just like that, by each and every one of us – and yet we still cling on.
Let me put it this way. Stop driving cars and the world comes to a standstill. Stop eating fish from the Pacific and nothing guarantees you won’t ingest a pollutant from your veggies. Stop eating meat and part of the economy collapses.
But quit cigarettes, and one of the plagues of the modern world is torn apart, without global repercussions (ok, part of the economy collapses, but screw it, we can live with it, pun intended!). It’s in our hands, reform that begins and ends with the individual.
Yes, that simple!
Still not convinced? Watch this…