Cully wrote:HK I did not say smokers were evil but I think that smoking is. Carry on smoking, die early of whatever disease smoking may gift you, carry on paying exorbitant taxes, take less in pensions, continue to smell of stale smoke on your clothes and your breath, carry on as long as you can convince yourself and others that you have a 'right to smoke'. Just take a moment to think about the consequences of your actions, if you have children think about how they might miss those years that you are happy to deny them.
However, I do feel some sympathy for you in that you are gripped by an addiction that is not easily rid. I'm sure you wish you had never started, good luck in giving up.
But you certainly implied it. We kill others, we spend your hard earned taxes, we destroy the environment.
I would like to give up, but more help is given to heroine addicts than to smokers. Illegal drug addicts need help, smokers just have to get on with giving up with just a hotline and self control. Methadone is available on the NHS, whilst nicorette (and others) cost as much as smoking a pack a day.
Maybe that's changed in the UK since I left, but it was certainly the case 15 years ago. I don't resent Heroine addicts the help they receive, but there could be some help for smokers which isn't just "put a colour photo of a lung on the pack and they'll stop."
Anyway, as I live 1000's of mles away, I won't kill you or spend your taxes on health care. I may take out a few people in HK, but the massive pollution here probably does that already. I'm sure my private health insurance will easily cover my medical issues if and when they arrive.
You know, I am supportive of bans on smoking in restaurants, bars, enclosed shopping malls, shops, even stadia and other high density public areas in the open air. I am concerned that I am massively villified by the anti-smoking lobby. I feel that I have become public enemy number 1 merely because of an addiction I have. In a world where people are tortured, robbed, raped, killed, my smoking seems to be the main problem in the world for some people.
Anyway, it's now 3:41am here. I have already spent longer on this topic than I ever intended. I'm not as commited to anti-anti-smoking as I may have come across tonight (yesterday my time), I just get a little ticked off on occasions.
'night all.