Smoking
Wow, a member asks for help and gets a rant on homosexuals.
Yeah, nothing like a good old-fashioned thoughtless, incoherent rant about gays to make ya feel better, right? I would say one has nothing to do with the other, but that's not true. Given the tobacco industry's
"They got lips, we want 'em!" attitude towards kids, it comes as no surprise at all that they specifically and effectively target gays and lesbians. It stands to reason; peer pressure and marketeering suggesting smoking brings sophistication and social ease will naturally be much more effective on people especially desperate to fit in because they know that they Don't. And the tobacco companies know this, and they
aggressively exploit it. See also
here,
here (Y'wanna talk about gays vs. smoking? Okeh, let's. Guess which is deadlier, HIV or smoking. Are you sure?),
here (note the nice "project SCUM" operation name), and
here.
Tobacco addiction is sad. It is also largely preventable, which makes it much more infuriating. Regulation, taxation, pfft; it really shows our values and priorities as a society that we still let these monsters manufacture and sell addictive misery and death. That we allow it in the name of "freedom" is completely insane. Go talk to a thousand smokers and I guarantee you'll lose count of the ones who've tried and failed to quit. Freedom? Looks more like slavery, to me.
If you go out and set a trap for an animal, put something tempting in it as bait to make the animal think it's choosing to consume something pleasurable and of no negative consequence and maybe even of some benefit, and it works and you catch it and slowly, painfully kill the animal, you get slapped with a fine if you don't have a licence or the animal's out of season. If you're a tobacco company and you do the same thing -- entrap, enslave and painfully kill twelve hundred people a day (in the U.S. alone) -- and you make them pay for the privilege, then that's "freedom of choice" and the "free market" and "adult decisions" and blah blah blahbitty blah blah. (Or, with a different spin on it: Kill someone with a pistol, and you get locked up or executed for it. Kill someone with cigarettes, and you get paid and tax-abated for it.)
It's no use wishing my friends and loved ones who smoke would start to stop
now and keep trying and trying and trying, making it first priority until they succeed. Addiction has nothing to do with reason; if it did, then it'd be a simple matter of "Smoking is going to cripple and/or kill me slowly, expensively, and with unimaginable pain; I'm going to stop right this instant". It's not, and that's why I am so furious at the tobacco industry and the almost entirely free pass they get for their ongoing mass murder.
Original poster: You can get your wife
this book, but you can't make her read it. You can't make her quit. She's the only one who can do that.
RedFish: Sorry, didn't mean to louse up your prejudices with facts and reality. Go back to sleep.