Smoking is now a big thing among the poorer uneducated minority classes and individuals.
Cool people; happy, rich successful people do not smoke.
Lucky for me I fall in neither category. And, I’m pretty damn cool either way. Oddly enough, the indigent homeless folks around here always seem to be able to come up with booze and cigs and pot and meth and heroin and cell phones and tats and piercings........
“Cool people; happy, rich successful people do not smoke.”
No, they snort cocaine and kill their livers with drinks; the ones who are not obese.
“Cool people; happy, rich successful people do not smoke.”
Go to a college campus.
Thirty years ago, at least half the students smoked, now maybe 5% smoke.
The Washington Post laments that the decline in U.S. smoking rates has largely been thanks to the massive decrease in smoking among the educated middle and upper classes. Among the poor, 40% continue to smoke.
Of course, this presents a dilemma to liberals. The punitive hikes in tobacco taxes were supposed to make it too expensive for poor people to smoke. Instead, the people paying for all the programs that are funded by tobacco taxes, programs that liberals love, are the people who can least afford to while those who were least impacted by cigarette price increases were the ones who quit.
The WP article was almost incredulous in tone. "How dare you wealthy people quit paying your fair share of tobacco taxes!"
America’s new tobacco crisis: The rich stopped smoking, the poor didn’t.