Quote:
Originally Posted by airstreamingypsy
The thing is, smoking affects all of us because of the health risks associated with smoking. Smokers are costing us billions of dollars.
Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people annually – more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined. Tobacco costs the U.S. over $300 billion in health care expenditures and more than $365 billion in lost productivity each year.
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If the quoted post was written to advocate making tobacco illegal across-the-board, there is a very good argument, apart from the infringement on an individual's right to make their own choices, to be made for that. Unfortunately there is no greater venue for hypocrisy in this great nation of ours than tobacco. And it can be summarized in two words.
Cash Cow.
I quit smoking cigarettes over 35 years ago now. I quit because (at $0.60 a pack more or less in Minnesota at that time) they were too expensive, and I was downing nearly 3 packs per day at the time. Today? Well, I was there a few months back and saw a person buy a carton of cigs at a convenience store, handed the clerk $100 and got back a couple of bucks, and those weren't even the front-line brands. I remember thinking that at that price, if I was still hooked on cigarettes, I could drink myself to death on some pretty pricy booze before I could smoke myself to death. $200 plus per week to feed an addiction is a LOT of money.
For those of you not knowing, Minnesota is and has been a hotbed of sanctimony for a loooooong time. We had the requisite lawsuit against Big Tobacco (as did most states), collected a bunch of money that was supposed to go toward correcting the ills caused by tobacco but didn't, and suffered (well, I didn't, because I had quit by that time) the price of tobacco products reaching astronomical levels. There are still the busybodies extant up there, the public crusaders who decry the ills of tobacco to all and sundry, but who will NEVER call for the total sales ban on tobacco because the proceeds from those sales (and lawsuits) go towards financing pork that most of us can only imagine.
I don't advocate banning tobacco in any form. But if you're going to advocate such a thing, at least do so honestly.