Why shouldn’t they be able to make this decision for themselves? Why do you want to dictate which decisions your grandchildren may or may not make? No, you can’t guarantee that your grandchildren will make the right decision. People are individuals and ultimately we all make our own decisions and are liable for our own actions. What would bring you more satisfaction, raising a person who rejected smoking because they felt it was the right thing to do, or raising a mindless automaton who does whatever you say?
Sorry for the gender mix-up, but your handle does have a female name in it. I’ll try not to make that mistake again.
Excuse me? I already pay piles of taxes “for the children”, just like anyone else. Nobody can explain in a convincing or satisfactory manner, why there are still no workable after school programs “for the children”. No one can satisfactorily explain why schools are supposedly going down the tubes, despite all the money “for the children”. At the risk of sounding like an evil libertarian, I am not responsible for any children you bring into the world. You are. If you can’t exert any control or influence over the choices they make, it is your problem/fault, not mine. Instead of demanding that the government do your parenting for you, take some responsibility.
Lucy(do you mind if I call you Lucy?), do you honestly think that banning tobacco would have enough of a beneficial effect on society that it would outweight the inevitable strife that results from the ban itself? In less time that it takes for a millions of people(and their children) to forget about tobacco, we will have produced drugs that can prevent or reverse the damage smoking causes.
I’ve quit smoking enough times to understand where you are coming from. A part of me agrees with you. Still, I would not hesitate to participate in the underground distribution of tobacco, should it be legally prohibited. I am willing to smoke by myself, in a designated area, with the lights off… but the minute you take even that from me, you’ve crossed the line. I’m talking postman-arab-with-an AK on his way to the farmer’s market type of you’ve better watch the fuck out.
And for LucyInDisguise, your grandchildren may eventually choose to drive recklessly. Do we just not allow them to drive in order to prevent accidents? As adults, they may decide to have premarital sex, or an extramarital affair. Do we outlaw sex to prevent their potential bad choices?
I understand your passion in wanting to defend your grandchildren against things that can hurt them, but taking away their right to be adults and make their own choices isn’t the way to do it.
Of which country? Because so far as I am aware, and the little sign at the 7-11 says, you have to be 18 years old to purchase tobacco products.
Just like pot, which is totally illegal and which they have an incredibly difficult time getting now.
And just why in the hell would we want to do that? Of course, if you do manage to ban alcohol, I have quite enough experience with chemistry and distillation to make pretty decent quality stuff myself.
Oh, it’s the old ‘reformed sinner’ thing.
So you’ll be banning skydiving, automobile driving, and all contact sports straight away as well?
Look, I know smoking is harmful to my health. I happen to not give a rat’s arse that it is. It is not up to you or anyone else to be my nanny. If I wish to smoke cigarettes, or shove thumbtacks under my fingernails, it’s none of your business.
I didn’t start smoking until I was 20. I knew the facts. I was an adult. Not everybody is like you and needs to be saved from themselves.
My grandmother never smoked a cigarette in her life. Y’know what she died of? Lung cancer.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret courtesy of Bill Hicks. Are you ready for it? Non-smokers die every day.
Everybody dies, Lucy. Smokers, non-smokers, all of us. Driving will kill a significant percentage of people who choose to drive. Living will kill everyone who lives. Get used to it.
Nor would banning alcohol help-my godmother and favorite aunt died of liver failure after years of alcohol abuse at the age of 39. (And she had been sober for about six months at the time).
Even if you had taken away the alcohol, she might have found something else to use to cope with her problems. It would have better to find out WHY some people abuse substances in the first place.
I loved my aunt and I hate that she had to die so young-but Prohibition is not the answer.
Okay …
(1) Thank you … as I said, I didn’t believe you did.
(2) Granted.
(3) True. I always tried to respect the rights of non-smokers and keep away. I never resented the restrictions in favor of non-smokers. (Well, almost never.)
(4) Granted. Emotions are driving me. (Don’t try to pretend they’re not driving you … See Below)
OP may have appeared to be an emotional, knee jerk reaction to something – I’ve already acknowledged and apologized for that. And if you’ve been keeping up on this thread you’re no doubt aware that I’ve backed off on many points … including the next one:
(5) Neither do I. Doesn’t stop me from wanting to find a place where our society doen’t feel the need to keep inflicting furture generations with this habit. Let us find more constructive things on which to exercise our Free Choice.
Please try to understand:
I’m a short timer when it comes to quiting. I may start smoking again next month, next week, or even, (hell) 2 hours from now. (Hope not – can’t guarantee that I won’t break down though … done it many times before.) If I do, it will not change my views.
My views did not spring up two days after I quit. They are the result of many years of frustration over having started in the first place, observing the financial and health impacts of the habit on myself and those around me all those years, reading health studies and much, much more. In other words: I did not come to them lightly.
Emotions. Yeah, well – I believe we all get a little hot sometimes. Emotions are the only thing that drives human berings to action. Hence, your post. If you were completely neutral, you would not have made the effort.
Were it not for emotions, there would be no such thing as a BMW. Transportation requires 4 wheels, a place to sit and a motor. Vanity, an emotion, creates BMW’s. For that matter, strickly speaking, getting from here to there requires not much more than your own two feet. Come to think of it, I doubt there is very little of our material world that does not owe its invention to the fulfillment of some emotion …)
(No, I’m not a psychologist … so let’s not go there. My experience with motivation comes from 13 years making a living in sales before becoming a Professional Driver. For the record – Prostitution isn’t the oldest profession. The 1st prostitute had to invent sales, first.)
Now, before I hit submit – let me peek …
Very thick hide here … so don’t worry about it … and it’s not necessarily a female name …
ninetypercent you may call me Lucy anytime. It actually is my name. See link above. As to the rest of your post, I hope the preceeding anouncement covered it …
Peeking once again …
Okay, one more time for emhasis should just about do it (I hope) …
No. I would not deny my grandchildren the opportunity to make choices, including mistakes. That is, after all is said and done, how all of us mortal human beings learn, isn’t it?
I just think this is one really stupid choice to leave on the table when, over a period of some decades, there might be some steps that we as responsible, reasoning, (maybe ever) sentinent beings could take to remove it.
Wait a minute while I read through that … :dubious:
Okay I think that says something pretty close to what I mean, sentence structure not withstanding …
Ya know, I just gotta call ya on this one. Don’t see where the views I’ve expressed here today necessitated the escalation to the level of a personal attack.
I actually read (somewhere) that, ultimately, life is fatal.
In fact, and I really did not intend to play this card but I am very much aware that people and children die from other causes unrelated to smoking.
In the future, please try reading all of the posts before hitting that reply link. If you had done that today, you would have found that most your post was redundant.
As I mentioned earlier, I am a smoker. I enjoy smoking, even though I know fully well it’s bad for me. I live in a house with three other smokers, and even if I was ready to quit right now, I don’t think the odds for success would be in my favor.
Maybe, instead of lobbying for a ban, we ought to lobby for more regulations on the tobacco industry. It is a venerable industry, but it’s really in this past half century that they started getting devious. The additives in cigarettes now are designed to make them more addictive, and also cause what probably is a majority of the damage to our systems. Here’s an interesting read. Cigarettes are designed to deliver more nicotine, ammonia is added to increase the amounts of nicotine that can be delivered from scrap tobacco while yet more additives keep that cheap scrap palatable. It’s a mess, and each tobacco company had myriad options for customizing their own brand of cancer sticks.
Steps have been taken to force the tobacco companies to accept responsibility for their deceptive advertising practices and their targeting of younger generations.
Considering their revenue, though, I don’t think a few lawsuits and making a few commercials is really hurting them at all. I feel that nicotine is a drug, and could be regulated as such. We wouldn’t let Pfizer add addiction enhancing agents to our painkillers, would we?
I totally agree with you that I don’t want my kids and grandkids smoking. There’s a good chance that I may never have started, at least not at such an early age, if my mother hadn’t been a heavy smoker all my life. I plan to do my best to lead them by personal example, though, quitting for good before any of my own kids are conceived. I don’t rely on the government to protect me from much of anything, and this is no different. It’s MY responsibility to see that my kids don’t smoke until they’re old enough to go buy smokes on their own, and by that time I hope to have imparted good judgement to them so that they don’t make the choice of picking up this habit.
Nitpick away about my emotions if you like. I’d rather you responded to the points you ignored. To restate/improve some:
*Tobacco advertisements are much less prominent and common than they used to be, and I’m pretty sure smoking is down. So why is a ban necessary at this point?
*Why is it necessary for such sharp punishments on behavior that is only self-destructive?
*Is punishment as strong as what you proposed really a good idea? I’m sure we could eliminate talking on cell phones in movie theatres if it was punishable by death, but doesn’t this seriously damage the concept of justice? What would be just about throwing smokers in jail, fining them large amounts of money, and putting a serious criminal conviction on their records? Your other statements make it sound like they are victims, not criminals.
*Prohibition didn’t only fail because people ‘couldn’t quit cold turkey,’ it failed because of organized crime (other posters mentioned this) and because people didn’t want to stop drinking. You make it sound like they could be persuaded to quit, or like they wanted to quit and were asked to do so too fast. I think these are both mistakes.
My theory is that the current crop of anti-smoking zealots tend to be in their mid fifties- early sixties and they are not seeing a follow-on group of zealots from the Gen-X’ers to continue the fight.
So current legislation regarding tobbacco is starting to look like a rear guard action to get what they can , while they can, before the roll backs in indoor smoking bans happen.
As I compose this I’m off line using my text editor. Don’t even want to go look to see what kind of train wreck my last 2 posts caused.
So, to catsix: my unjustified knee-jerk reaction to your post was boorish and inexcusable. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
The short explanation goes something like this: your post contained a phrase which resembles (metaphorically) a spear from a long dead hand being thrust from the grave through the one chink in my armor that I believed had been repaired long ago. (Felt an awful lot like a low blow …)
Discussing this with my wife, she has confirmed my suspicion that that particular phrase is still the one ‘hot-button’ that can send me into a blind rage. I’ll try to get that armor fixed proper this time. (Currently searching for receipt – oh, hell – the warranty has probably expired anyway …)
Again, my sincere apologies.
To all:
I recognize (now) that my OP probably should have gone something more like this:
Wouldn’t be nice, if at sometime in the future, our grandchildren’s grandchildren didn’t have to deal with such things as tobacco, alcohol, drugs and other such things and could spend their financial and intellectual resources on more important things?
Maybe not. Sounds awfully wimpish to me. ::long_sigh::
What really spooks me, though, is how many of the rationalizations that I used for 30 years are still being used to justify the choice to continue smoking.
Ohhh, well.
I have enough miles behind me to recognize when my position has become untenable. It is my opinion that this thread should probably be allowed to wander off and die in the Land of Hopefully Not Completely Lost Causes.
That having been said, I’m going to go peek at the train wreck now.
Hmmmm. Not nearly as bad as I expected. Thanks.
And a sincere thanks to all of you who weighed in on this subject. I hope that the debate continues. I sincerely believe that at some point in the furure I may even be able to find a way to better express what is I’ve been trying to say here.
