Cigarettes, enough to drive you to drink ...

Contratrombone64

Admiral of Fugues
Food for thought:

Warning, this rant contains strong language, do not read it if you are offended by strong language

Putting the kybosh on tabacco is like cracking down on satan worship. It's easy to put the boot into something that is antisocial without an apology. Smoking stinks and it's bad for you and it'll likely kill you.

By government estimates, Australia pays out around $31 billion per year in healthcare and lost productivity due to smoking. It kills 16,000 Aussies each year and, more importantly, deludes vacuous teenagers into thinking they are "cool" when in point of fact they just look like vacuous teens trying to be "cool".

So where does the government stand on alcohol, equally deadly when misused. Even though it's a citizen's right to walk about down town on a saturday evening without getting bothered, accosted, assulted, run over or vomitted on by some fu.ckwit who gets a dose of "big man syndrome" by getting pis.sed. Because if smoking is the devil worship of legal substance ingestion then surely drinking drinking is the Christianity.

Don't get me wrong, I love a drink occasionally and I try my best to limit my intake so that my judgement isn't hindred as a result.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this from a British perspective (Margaret), Canadian (Stephen) or American (Lars). Feel free to pipe in.
 
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Krummhorn

Administrator
Staff member
ADMINISTRATOR
Admin note: moved thread to current location - Topic better suited for Open Debate :)

It's true ... alcohol kills more people annually than smoking ever did. When there is a deadly accident here, the cause is 99.999% of the time alcohol related. I've yet to ever hear or read of an accident where it said "the driver was smoking a cigarette!"

There was so much ado about the 29 Kentucky miners who were killed during an underground explosion ... the US President has taken on a personal task to assure that this kind of needless death doesn't occur again.

I do feel lots of compassion for those who lost a loved one in this mining accident, but what about the thousands upon thousands of people who get killed because of alcohol ... when are we going to do something about this? No disrespect is intended for the 29 miners, but it would be nice if our US President also acknowledged that there are thousands of preventable deaths caused by alcohol related accidents, and then do something with the same convictions as he is going with for the miners at large?

A mine explosion of this magnitude doesn't occur every minute of each day ... death caused by alcohol abuse does occur, and needlessly kills people every hour of every day. Why isn't something being done by our government?

The nimwits are in our Congress and Senate ... :ut:

I too, occasionally enjoy a drink or two, or several glasses of wine ... I would never even think of driving in an impaired condition. I am also a former smoker who quit cold turkey 5.5 years ago ... haven't touched one since that day in November 2004.
 

Dorsetmike

Member
I used to smoke until about 8 years ago, I blame smoking partly for loss of my ability to sing counter tenor around age 40, lack of practice was also partly to blame.

In my "yoof" I did on occasion drink a bit more than was necessary (difficult not to in the armed forces) Now it's down to a glass of mead most eveings, a 75cL bottle lasts over a week.

I think both substances need more control and more education. Smoking could and should be banned completely, but is unlikely in UK as it generates so much tax income for the government. Alcohol consumption is in a similar position re tax, but needs strict control rather than an outright ban. It will never be easy though.

One thing I have noticed is that there are far more jokes and cartoons about drunkeness than smoking, is there a clue there?

David's comment re vomit reminds me of one term I have heard to describe one of the results.

Pavement Pizza.
 

Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Yep, and the devil in the details is that hardly enough people hold their elected officials feet to the fire in re to smokings' hidden costs that every tom, dick, harry, mary, cherry, and sally pay in the form of the *annual extortion* enacted by the very same elected officials.
 
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