Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Smoking kills? Really??
The surgeon general is getting pretty ridiculous. Once again, there is a "study" about how smoking is hazardous to your health, this time focused specifically on second-hand smoke. The study calls for states to ban smoking in public areas, indicating that even having separate smoking and non-smoking areas in restaurants/bars/clubs is not sufficient to prevent non-smokers from inhaling second-hand smoke.
To all this my response is: NO SHIT SHERLOCK. I'm glad the government has wasted tons of taxpayer dollars to let us all know the stunningly obvious. If you're in the same room as a smoker, you can small the smoke. If you can smell the smoke, then you're inhaling the smoke. And yes, it's bad for you to inhale the smoke. We know it's bad. Nobody has seriously debated the detriments of smoking for the past two decades. It's a complete waste of time for the government to keep spending money on studies and ads and literature that proclaims how bad smoking is. Everyone knows. Most people have stopped smoking. Those who haven't simply don't care about the health effects. They'd rather lose weight. Or look cool. Or be a rebel. Or whatever! But it's not from an ignorance of the health effects.
The real solution is to BAN SMOKING. Make smoking illegal. Tobacco is a poison with no known useful properties. Why should it even be legal? The only sane choice is to outlaw it. Everything else is a waste of money and/or hypocrisy.
It's ridiculous to force smokers into little "smoking rooms" in airports, or make them stand outside in the rain to get a smoke. We are practicing segregation here when we do that. They have their own rooms, their own sections in rooms, to go "do their thing". How is this different from the colored section of the bus? And now the government is increasingly trying to paint smoking in a bad light, which creates a negative stigma around those who decide to continue smoking. It's essentially a form of discrimination. It needs to stop.
Either the government should cease wasting public tax dollars to tell us what we already know, or they should ban smoking. Anything short of that just wastes everyone's time.
To all this my response is: NO SHIT SHERLOCK. I'm glad the government has wasted tons of taxpayer dollars to let us all know the stunningly obvious. If you're in the same room as a smoker, you can small the smoke. If you can smell the smoke, then you're inhaling the smoke. And yes, it's bad for you to inhale the smoke. We know it's bad. Nobody has seriously debated the detriments of smoking for the past two decades. It's a complete waste of time for the government to keep spending money on studies and ads and literature that proclaims how bad smoking is. Everyone knows. Most people have stopped smoking. Those who haven't simply don't care about the health effects. They'd rather lose weight. Or look cool. Or be a rebel. Or whatever! But it's not from an ignorance of the health effects.
The real solution is to BAN SMOKING. Make smoking illegal. Tobacco is a poison with no known useful properties. Why should it even be legal? The only sane choice is to outlaw it. Everything else is a waste of money and/or hypocrisy.
It's ridiculous to force smokers into little "smoking rooms" in airports, or make them stand outside in the rain to get a smoke. We are practicing segregation here when we do that. They have their own rooms, their own sections in rooms, to go "do their thing". How is this different from the colored section of the bus? And now the government is increasingly trying to paint smoking in a bad light, which creates a negative stigma around those who decide to continue smoking. It's essentially a form of discrimination. It needs to stop.
Either the government should cease wasting public tax dollars to tell us what we already know, or they should ban smoking. Anything short of that just wastes everyone's time.
