tobaco police, page-41

Well said Upmarket, I have read the same evidence. My concerns are that the current religious attitude against smoking is, at heart, more of a puritan thing and a righteousness thing and smokers are one of the last easy targets. We worked out a long time ago that the same attitudes did not help alcohol abusers (Prohibition) and heroin addicts and that harm minimisation is the best way to go if you actually want to benefit peoples health. I am not opposed to plain packaging and deglamourisation of smoking and I am certainly not in favor of smoking but I am against the religious demonisation of people with a vice that incidentally is of the working class. I think it is counterproductive.

We could have introduced smokeless cigarettes and snuss in Australia but the religious attitude precludes these harm minimisation measures so they are banned. We do not support people to reduce or to make sure all other risk factors such as diet and exercise are dealt with because there is only one god, and his name is quit. We make working class people ashamed of going to the doctor or to be dishonest and lie because of religious attitudes that demonise them. We ban smoking from psychiatric insititutions so then psychotic people avoid them and harm themselves in much more immediate and destructive ways.

We do not care much about sedentary behaviour or overwork in offices or junk food that contribute to risk factors for death as much as if not more so than smoking.

The law of diminishing returns says that once we have expended a certain effort on something, redoubling and redoubling our efforts are going to bring proportionally less and less returns. Better to start looking at these other factors, in particular, work life balance and encouragement of greater amounts of physical activity.

Did you know the oldest person who ever lived was a light smoker?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment