I think pipe smoking was great !

Over a dollar tax for every cigarette.
The people who are really paying for this are the single mothers of dysfunctional boys.
Some of these kids will put their mothers in hospital just for a cigarette;
And they will rob people for money just to get smokes.

Only 10% of people in the country smoke now.
This is why they keep putting the taxes up.
The government has increasing expenses and this is the easiest way to get it.
It needs to maintain (and increase) the money it makes from tax.

Only 10% smoke? And big tobacco is looking for more victims it can addict with its carcinogenic product! Cause addicts are usually, customers for life? And seem relatively healthy while they are comparatively young?

But as an older cohort who smoked for years, require massive medical assistance with cancer and (puff, wheeze) emphysema! And ongoing care for years, that invariably cost much more in every which way than their tobacco tax!

They also occupy expensive hospital beds that are then denied to non-smokers with serious non-self-inflicted ailments.

Moreover, if all the money they burned or sent up in smoke had been put aside and invested in income-earning investments. Their retirement and quality of life could be so much better! And even less of a drain on a diminishing cohort of taxpayers!

And our public health could concentrate on other non-smoke related health issues!

The addicted 10% have no right to oblige non-smokers to inhale a product as passive smokers who have never ever given consent to this offensive carcinogenic pollution being forced into their airways by some indifferent and selfish up-wind A-holes!

Keep lifting the tax until these brainless (puff, wheeze, cough, Houck, spit) suckers finally get the message!
Alan B

Smokers are paying for that care, many times over.

"The addicted 10% have no right to oblige non-smokers to inhale a product as passive smokers who have never ever given consent to this offensive carcinogenic pollution being forced into their airways by some indifferent and selfish up-wind A-holes!"

Yeah, everything you say is true, health is the greatest wealth.
But please also keep this in mind:
The government doesn't really care about the non-smokers right to not inhale others smoke.
It cares about revenue, and in order to help these non-smokers enjoy a right of not having to inhale others smoke, it will issue more fines.
That's how government helps - by taking more of others money.
Taxes and fines, the government wants your money anyway it can get it.
Because they cant even pay themselves if they don't take from others.

I remember when I first started smoking
Billboards everywhere.
'Anyhow have a Winfield'
'Peter Stuyvesant'
'B&H'

The government didn't just profit from the cigarettes themselves.
It profited off the advertising that helped to get me hooked.

Yes I should've given up by now.
It does cost too much in the end.
Bad teeth, eyesight, and that cough.
- But the government has been cashing in the whole entire way.
And now kids between the ages of 14 and 20 will have to go to desperate measure to get $50 for a pack of smokes.
They will steal and rob you if that's what it takes.
I know, I was 15 once too.

Lucky for me ciggies were only $2 back then.

Some people have crap in their lives, they grew up around others who smoked and they are going to do it anyway.
I was one of those kids.

Football is to the mind what cigarettes are to the body !