SSSSSMOKIN'!

I spent three years watching my girlfriend's mom gradually succumb to cancer because she smoked cigarettes for 37 years.

She had two tumors on each lung, and was pronounced "in the clear" after three surgeries and months of radiation and chemo.

A month later she started having headaches, and a tumor was discovered inside her brain, having metastasized from her lungs.
She had seven brain surgeries, another year of chemo and "cyberknife" (aka hyper-intense radiation) treatments, and in the end she died in her living room as her mother (my then-girlfriend's grandmother) tried to help her take pain pills anally because her throat no longer functioned.

She also had lupus and rheumatoid arthritis BEFORE being diagnosed with cancer.

I married her daughter three months after her death.

The thing which blows my mind is that several of this lady's relatives, who ALL saw what she went through and KNEW why she was forced to experience it, have since STARTED SMOKING.

I understand that if you've had the habit for years/decades it can be a struggle to quit.
What I don't understand is the people every year who, with all of the above type information available to them, START smoking.

There's just no excuse for that kind of stupidity nowadays.
We don't have TV/radio/Internet commercials for cigarettes, especially ones like they had in the 50's which encouraged "good" smoking, or the little pamphlets which detailed the health benefits of smoking cigarettes.

I should probably specify that I'm mainly going after CIGARETTE smokers.
Usually, pipe and cigar smokers are at home or outside when they smoke, and because more work went into producing what they are smoking, they tend to consume less (and produce less second-hand smoke).

Cigarette smokers, on the other hand, are MASS consumers, plowing through quickie after quickie, day after day, and polluting the air the rest of us were using before they showed up.

I've never heard of a two-pack-a-day CIGAR smoker.



Now, how should this play out on the legal end?
Keep cigarettes legal, legalize marijuana, and charge users of both out the wazoo in special sales taxes, production taxes, etc.
Do so, knowing that no marijuana user worth his/her/its salt is going to go farther away for it than their own backyard.