SMOKING KILLS

[Loony BoB]

Me? A non-smoker that doesn't like that smoking is legal? However did you guess?

Heaven forbid people be able to make their own decisions about what goes in their bodies. I suppose you'd like to see Big Macs outlawed too?

There are two ways to look at that, I guess. Firstly, "Because a Big Mac harms you, too!" - no, it doesn't. It has a high fat content and whatever, sure, but so long as you don't eat other overly fatty foods throughout the day, there is nothing wrong with eating a Big Mac. It's food, just like all other foods. There is nothing directly harmful about a Big Mac unless you have it in excess. One could even go as far as to say that a Big Mac could potentially make up part of a healthy diet on the condition that the other foods you ate throughout the day (and the energy you used up) balanced out.

Cigarettes damage your own body from the first inhalation and can damage the bodies of others as well. There is basically no health benefit whatsoever, and from what I understand only serve to relieve stress, provide some sense of warmth and to feed an addiction. The former two things can be done in other ways and the latter thing is not a true benefit and wouldn't be required if you didn't smoke cigarettes in the first place. Cigarettes also cause damage to unborn children yet there is no law against pregnant women smoking. I find this stupid, personally, but sadly there are so many people who argue for everything out there to be legalised, and also for everything that is legal now to stay legal forever regardless of the changes in knowledge over the years. If the problems with cigarette use were known to the general public at the time they first came into production I'm fairly sure they would have been classed a drug from then onwards.

I don't really feel at great risk from cigarette smoke, and the dwindling number of people who smoke in places I am these days means that I don't inhale much second hand smoke these days, either. But I want it illegalised because I fear that someday my children may take up smoking at a young age and then become addicted and ruin their body with that addiction. The fact that it's even illegal to do it as a youth pretty much sums up the fact that everyone knows that it's not good for you and that you shouldn't really do it if you want to be healthy.

I understand taxes can be higher due to cigarette smoking, too, but I'm not heavily bothered by that at the moment. Maybe other people might be. Either way, again, it's just another drug people can get addicted to. The only difference is that it doesn't work quickly. The downside of that is it's legal, and that means that people have it for a long time, which means that it is allowed to work slowly. Sort of like saying that if cocaine didn't damage you in a quick way then it would be totally cool to do it over time instead. It's pretty weird to me that some people don't understand why other people want it made illegal.

Still, that's just how I feel about smoking. Almost every friend I have at work smokes, and a bunch of friends I have outside of work smoke too. I gave up on lecturing for the most part, although there have been occasions where I have probably gone overboard with it from time to time.