h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now really. I think that smoking should be allowed, if only in "designated" areas.

There is a long history of unhealthy things being assimilated into our lifestyles. Moneymakers.

If we're going to ban smoking then we shouldn't just stop there. We should ban sex, cars that run on gasoline, alchohol, yelling, guns, unreliable prescriptions ("may cause fatigue, insomnia, diarrhea, heart failure, toenail fungus", but will this cure the mental problems, my psychosomatic symptoms society has somehow unwittingly caused me?), fast food, fatty food,aeroplanes, shoes that cause hammer toes, and breathing in general...blah blah blah.

really, it's not like the world will ever be a utopia. c'mon, it's already a sesspool. let's just not make any new ick, and perhaps slowly our old mistakes will rectify themselves.

I say give me my small pleasures, if i don't help kill me, something else will. After all, there is free will (forget logos and syngergy and all of that forceful junxae). I don't have a marlboro rep forcing me to suck down a pack of smokes, ronald mcdonald doesnt come to my house and strap me down to feed me hamburgers.

you do it to yourself.

if there are any changes to be made anywhere, they have to be made from the inside out, on an individual level. The republics and democracies...I think have lost their right to policing our freedom to debauch ourselves especially since they play for both sides of the game. Who's behind campaigns against smoking? Who's behind the millions of ads supposedly creating new smokers daily? It's all the same. The many sides of the same di.

The passage, "I don't have a marlboro rep forcing me to suck down a pack of smokes," while it is technically a true statement, is only really applicable when there is nobody else nearby. Once you include such petty details as other people, they are probably being forced either to inhale the smoke from someone else's self-indulgence or to stop breathing entirely. Both of these options tend to be detrimental to people's health, but I suppose we all have our rights to do what we wish to ourselves. If someone finds their "small pleasures" in throwing rocks through windows, then it should be perfectly legal. Or maybe these ills will "rectify themselves" sometime soon. Smoking for example--it's only spent the last four hundred years or so increasing in influence and is one of the biggest industries in the world and determined to hold on.

The thing is, banning smoking will not stop many people from doing it; the lesson of Prohibition still hold true. In an ideal world, in which people obeyed the laws, banning smoking would be a good idea except that in an ideal world there would be no smoking anyway and there would be no need to ban it.

What fun.

well. toxins are inhaled daily by everyone, and that icky poo junxage doesn't just come from smokers. cars, factories, aerosols...etc...do help.

what i'm really trying to say...is that it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place along with all other pollutants. obviously. so i absolutely agree with your last paragraph.


perhaps if non-smokers are so concerned about their health, they should open their own personal non-smoking establishments and smokers can have their separate smoking establishments. Divisions of humanity, lovely. or stay home, or start manufacturing protective bubble oxygen mask thingamajiggers. i'm sure it could be all the rage. accessorizing for safety while boosting the economy.

perhaps if i were forced to roll my own cigarettes i wouldn't be such a smokestack. bleh.

Of course, western civilization is basically going in a direction for which I do not know a sufficiently strong word (I don't know enough about others to make an educated statement), so arguing over one vice is rather trivial. I just feel cynical and polemical some days.

Hey come on now - sex is good for you.

Not that vice, silly (not that I know much about either).