It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ’em. And they don’t give a rip.

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I don’t begrudge your choice to smoke cigarettes as long as you:

1) Keep it out of my face.

2) Keep it out of my kids’ face.

3) Quit throwing them out of your god-damned window.

4) Pay your fair share: don’t expect me to pay higher life, disability or health insurance premiums. You should though.

5) Let me bum one off of you once a year or so for old times.

But seriously, if you don’t know smoking is dangerous by now, is it because the government hasn’t done an adequate job of edumacating you?

Apparently the government thinks you’re so damn stupid that the dangers can only be conveyed to you in pictures.

Corpses, cancer patients and diseased lungs are among the images the federal government plans for larger, graphic warning labels that would take up half of each pack of cigarettes sold in the United States.

Whether smokers addicted to nicotine will see them as a reason to quit remains a question.

Sounds like another shovel-ready project to me.

The share of Americans who smoke has fallen dramatically since 1970, from nearly 40 percent to about 20 percent, but the rate has stalled since about 2004. About 46 million adults in the U.S. smoke cigarettes.

In the same period, the average cost per pack has gone from 38 cents to $5.33. Much of those increases are from state and federal taxes.

It’s unclear why declines in smoking have stalled. Some experts have cited tobacco company discounts or lack of funding for programs to discourage smoking or to help smokers quit.

I would submit to you that there are a certain percentage of us that are going to smoke cigarettes.  They like to smoke. It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ’em. And they don’t give a rip.

In the mean time are we to assume the federal government intends to spend more and more of everyone’s tax dollars until there are no smokers left? Maybe we should just let evolution run its course.

19 thoughts on “It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ’em. And they don’t give a rip.”

  1. I like it, but only on one condition. If every Planned Parenthood aborturary shows photos of aborted babies.

  2. I’ve read (too lazy to look it up) that cigarette smoking is in fact an economic positive to the state inasmuch as the tax revenue from the product and the foregone SS/pension benefits from premature death more than outweigh any marginal health care costs the state might be required to assume.

    If so, this would be yet another (were any required) illustration of the inability of liberals to comprehend basic economic reality.

  3. Most of the people who still smoke are in the working class or lower.
    Chesterton wrote a marvelous essay on the wickedness of the government working to “discourage” the vices of the poor.
    The time was World War I and the topic was a stipend that military widows were given after their husbands were killed on the front. The ordnance factories depended on women as workers. The government depended on the ammo they produced to execute the war. The factory managers were complaining that the war widows would drink their stipend away and this would make them miss work.
    In one of his lesser-known essays Chesterton got into extremely high dudgeon about this (no one does this as well as Chesterton).
    How dare you? How dare you, you bastards? You’ve taken everything from these women — their love, their lives, the children and grandchildren of their dreams, and you begrudge them the solace of a little gin at night?
    I feel about the government attempt to eliminate the use of tobacco the same way that Chesterton felt about the proposed “gin tax” of 1917. These people, these “smokers”, take your trash way, do the unpleasant business of caring for your children, cleaning your septic tanks, mowing your freakin’ lawns, stocking the shelves for you at Nordstroms and Bergdorf-Goodman, fixing your damn $60,000 cars while they drive cars decades old that smell like burnt oil and sulfur, and you think they shouldn’t smoke? Because the idea of there smoking upsets you?
    Go fuck yourself.
    Glad I got that out.

  4. When I wrote “Go fuck yourself” in the previous comment, I was not referring to JR 🙂
    Not specifically.

  5. They better not smoke when they are taking care of MY kids. And it ain’t “burnt oil and sulfur.” It’s tobacco.

    In the case of alcohol use, we limit their driving. That’s where the interface with the rest of society becomes dangerous.

    In the case of smoking, we limit where they can do it. That’s where the interface with society becomes dangerous,

    If smokers don’t like it – tough 🙁

  6. Gee Roush — you seem not to have a problem with tobacco industry checks being handed out by Boehner on the floor of congress to other legislators, in order to affect tobacco legislation. That’s as dirty as any smoking residue.

    Smoking rates vary tremendously from state to state; and smoking has plateaued after going down steeply. Some give the credit to smoking bans, others to restricting some forms of advertisement, others to campaigns against smoking. So, this is an attempt to encourage healthier habits with another anti-smoking campaign – I wish them success.

    But you won’t Roush, only I suspect because it is an Obama adminstration initiative. You missed a chance to gripe about money spent on a study of CAT scans to detect lung cancer that benefits smokers btw.

    Now I wrote not only about this – but about the Dutch overturning their smoking ban, and how they managed to find an innovative way to give greater respect to the rights of smokers, to business that wish to cater to customers who want to smoke, and worked in something from our MD contributor on the subject as well http://penigma.blogspot.com/2010/11/where-theres-smokethere-is-smoking.html#more

    What – nothing on veterans day? Happy Veterans Day to all the readers on SitD, and thank you to all those who have served to defend this country. We should never ever take that service for granted.

    Maybe we’ll get one of those wonderful military history pieces from Mitch later. I love those. Or maybe he will have looked up the information by now on the old woman with Alzheimer’s who may have voted…. I’m waiting for that too.

  9. Gee Roush — you seem not to have a problem with tobacco industry checks being handed out by Boehner on the floor of congress to other legislators, in order to affect tobacco legislation. That’s as dirty as any smoking residue.

    Dog – stretch much?

    My issue is the government encroaching more and more in our lives.

    I’m from the government. I’m here to help.

    Most readers probably got that.

    PS Pooch, it’s Roosh, not Roush. He’s the mustang performance guy.

  10. Has it occurred to anyone else that there’s a demographic that the busybodies particularly wish to protect, which is likely to buy MORE cigarettes as a direct result of this policy? I refer to teenage boys, who like nothing better than gross-out photos. They’ll be collecting them like baseball cards.

  12. Regarding Boehner handing out campaign funds obtained from tobacco industry sources; ahem, it’s legal, and the companies have a Constitutional right to lobby, especially as legislatures apparently think that government is somehow competent to fix the problems they caused by putting a pack of heaters in each bundle of C rations during our nation’s wars.

    I despise tobacco, but please. We have a Constitution here.

  13. I’m sure Dog has no problem with SEIU and AFL/CIO checkes being handed out.
    If it wasn’t for double standards….

  16. I feel the same way when someone tosses a lit heater out the window of a car that I do when Dog and Teh Peevee paste a link to their little twaddle-pit in comment threads I’m reading.

  17. Bubba, I’m pretty sure I remember hearing “that other local conservative talk show host” (as Mitch likes to call him) mention several times that the horribly biased judge in the MN tobacco trials would not allow the defense to introduce into evidence, data showing that Minnesota took in more money from tobacco taxes, than it spent on tobacco related health problems.

    It wasn’t a matter of not comprehending economic reality, it was a matter of refusing to accept documented factual truth.

  18. OK, Bill, let’s assume that’s true; why didn’t the deep pockets at the tobacco companies do a better job of appeals? It would seem that refusing to allow evidence into consideration would be an almost automatic way to get a decision overturned.

  19. Bubbasan, I think Bill C is responding to an earlier post of mine.

    I’m not an attorney, and I don’t play one on TV, so my opinion is worth what you’re paying for it. But I’d guess that those facts weren’t in dispute or deemed to be relevant to the case.

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