The tobacco consumer pays extra for: Health insurance, life insurance, car insurance, and homeowners insurance. We also pick up the tab for the "settlement", along with all the taxes on a pack of smokes.
We would end up paying for an additional insurance program.
ENOUGH!
Just imagine a world without cigarettes. If you weigh 400 pounds and DIE, there would be no cigarettes to blame. If you work with carcinogenic dusts, chemicals, or fumes in your workplace and happen to have cancer, the cigarettes would not be blamed.
The parents of toddlers with leukemia would have to look for a different boogeyman.
If you fall off a damn bridge what would they blame if not the cigarette in your hand?
WOW! Doctors would have to start learning jack squat about their patients and practicing real medicine again!
Is this all tobacco nazi crap science or is it just an excuse to get rid of something some people don't particularly like?
Something safer for police to do (take cigarettes away from grandmas in a bingo parlor) rather than pursue criminals who might be making methamphetamine, who just might get violent?
And before anyone tries to palm off the "secondhand smoke" study as science, forget it. It is a computer model, not hard data. It has no basis in fact.
For the anti-smoker, go ahead, ban them allready. Get it over with, let your tax coffers go COLD TURKEY right along with the rest of us. Don't have the moral fortitude for that, do you?, just enough to treat us worse than Jim Crow Negroes and act condescending. (Negroes under Jim Crow at least had their own section at restaurants, bars, and the back of the bus.) But we smokers are just nicotine niggers, not real human beings, right?
For the consumer of tobacco:
You want to smoke?
There are only a half-million or so people in North Dakota, move here and we'll elect a tobacco friendly government. Yep, the weather sucks, it is either too cold or too hot. There are no really outstandingly splenid scenic areas the Government does not own allready, so we won't get overrun with Hollywood types and so many whiny tourists we can't keep it that way. We might have to give Fargo to Minnesota, but that would cut the state's crime (and budget!) nearly in half anyway.
I was one of the people who supported the idea of a no smoking SECTION so non-smokers would not have to be inconvenienced by me having a cigarette, and look where that went. I have learned my lesson. NEVER AGAIN! NOT ANOTHER INCH.
Like you, I never had a problem with smoking and non-smoking sections. We, as smokers, were considerate and respected the choices of non-smokers to have their own isolated territory. But that was not good enough.
Today, I am sick and tired of being treated like a nigger. Yes, I used that word for a very valid reason.
When you are the person being treated like a nigger, how dare the politically correct police censor our choice of words, when we are simply trying to express an outrage about being treated as the scum in America.
Have we not learned anything since the 1960's?
I have drawn my line in the sand.
When the time was right, Blacks Americans refused to be segregated to the back of the bus. The vast majority of White Americans understood how wrong this was, and stood up with them and made a historical change.
In today's America, smokers are not even allowed on the bus!
Like you, I never had a problem with smoking and non-smoking sections. We, as smokers, were considerate and respected the choices of non-smokers to have their own isolated territory. But that was not good enough.
Today, I am sick and tired of being treated like a nigger. Yes, I used that word for a very valid reason.
When you are the person being treated like a nigger, how dare the politically correct police censor our choice of words, when we are simply trying to express an outrage about being treated as the scum in America.
Have we not learned anything since the 1960's?
I have drawn my line in the sand.
When the time was right, Blacks Americans refused to be segregated to the back of the bus. The vast majority of White Americans understood how wrong this was, and stood up with them and made a historical change.
In today's America, smokers are not even allowed on the bus!
Finally!! Two people who say it like it is!! I agree with your attitudes 100%.!!! We aren't allowed to have our own section, or even get on the bus.