What;s wrong with kids these days?

Addiction has nothing to do with reason. If it did, then smokers -- the overwhelming majority of which want to quit -- would simply go "I'm going to throw these away right now and never smoke another one" and that would be that. A (very) few people manage to do that, but most would-be quitters fail again and again and again. It is a large error to blame the smoker. Tobacco is the profiteer marketer's wet-dream product: using it does nothing but make the user need more. Okeh, yes, with what we've officially known since 1964 (and suspected since long before then, and common-sensed since forever) it can only be called a thoughtless poor decision to start smoking. But we all make thoughtless poor decisions, and blaming (humiliating, shaming, mocking, scolding) smokers on top of the awful consequences they're already burdened with by that one bad decision not only doesn't accomplish anything, it also points the blame in the wrong direction.

Y'want to kill for money? Choose your murder weapon carefully. Take a look at the tobacco industry's "They got lips, we want 'em!" attitude towards kids. Now guess which is more deadly, which kills more people: HIV/AIDS or smoking. If you guessed HIV/AIDS, you're wrong, it's smoking.

Tobacco addiction is grievously sad. It is also largely preventable, which makes it much more infuriating. Regulation, schmegulation; it is astounding to me that we still let these monsters sell slavery, addictive misery and agonizing death. That we allow it in the name of "freedom" is positively orwellian. 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're a tobacco company and you do the same thing -- entrap, imprison, 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. Ask a smoker how much choice he has to smoke the next cigarette. Go on, I dare you, go find a smoker who has to go outside and fix his addiction twenty to forty times a day, whether it's 30 below zero and snowing or 130 in the blazing sun, and ask him why he "chooses" to smoke. Why do you "choose" to eat and drink every day? Sure, food and water really are essential to survival and nicotine isn't, but fact is, using tobacco alters the brain so it treats nicotine as essential to survival, the same as food and water.

(Or, with a different spin on it: Kill someone with a gun and you get locked up or lethally injected for it. Kill millions of people with cigarettes, and you get paid and subsidized and tax-abated for it, and you get to be the poster child for "freedom".)

No, the smoker's the wrong target for the disgust and disdain, which belongs squarely targeted at the tobacco companies and the ineffective "regulators". It's a legal product? Yes, and by any reasonable standard it shouldn't be. We've kicked off the market every other product that kills and maims even a fraction of the number of people killed and maimed by tobacco. A food item or a prescription drug or a lawn mower or a toaster oven that caused even one ten-thousandth of the gory carnage caused by tobacco would be off the market yesterday. It utterly gobsmacks me that we allow the sale of such a hideously dangerous, addictive product right on the open market, with advertising and brand competition and everything, subject only to the crudest, laxest, and most easily circumvented restriction of all products meant to be taken internally -- all ya gotta be is 18, and ya can't smoke in public places -- and we do it in the name of freedom and on putative principle of free-market capitalism. It is perversity. It is tragic. It is not a "freedom", it is not a "habit", it is not a "pastime", it is not a "pleasure", not a "choice to enjoy", it is a viciously addictive and deadly drug, full stop. Most of its users ingest it in the most damaging possible way, full stop. It's still legal because people are still addicted because it's still legal because people are addicted because it's legal. It is past time for tobacco to be made subject to much, much stricter legal regulation as to content and restriction as to availability and commerce. For current addicts to be serviced with inexpensive and easily available, thoughtfully-researched and -developed nicotine pills or other standardised relatively safe delivery modes -- we know this is possible; the tobacco industry knows how to make them -- and thus to break the continuity of the addiction trap at the societal level.

Logistically it wouldn't be too difficult: next year the age rises to 19, then to 20, then to 21, then to 22, etc., year by year until nicotine products are available only by prescription (there are certain mental illness conditions that are effectively relieved only by nicotine). Even with lavish expenditure on 100% subsidy of such nicotine doses and all kinds of cessation programs and assistance programs, it would still have to cost a tiny fraction of what we all lose to tobacco's wreckage (and that's only counting the dollars…what's a mother worth? A father, a grandfather, an aunt, a son, a brother, a sister?).

You say it won't work because Prohibition failed? I say your analogy's faulty. When Canada tried heavy taxation, smoking dropped way off briefly. Then the tobacco companies began smuggling enormous quantities of cigarettes over the border via indian reservations, smoking rates went back up, the tobacco companies successfully quashed the tax because "it's not working", and simultaneously defrauded the Canadian government of enormous tax revenues. That's the same reason Prohibition failed: the effort was taking place on only one side of the border. Sure, there'll always be die-hards and smugglers and black-marketeers, but thoughtful implementation determines whether they win or lose on the larger scale. Consider: in the early days of unleaded gasoline, there was a big problem with people shoving a chopstick or pen down the fill pipe of their new unleaded-fuel cars to open the flap door and fill up with leaded regular, because it was cheaper. This threatened to spoil the pollution-reduction effort; the solution was obvious and easy: tax rates were adjusted slightly so unleaded was the same price or a few cents cheaper than leaded. Easy.

I struggle to mind that there is less than zero effect of any amount of frantically 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. I empathise with them. 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 agonisingly; 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.