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Alright, so you'd prefer a well thought out sampling of why? Frankly, I thought the one line was just as legitimate a question as the OP posed, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.
1) Because smoking is dangerous for the smoker as well as those around the smoker. If I eat 4000 calories a day, it doesn't affect you because you sit at the next table.
2) Because some of us are non-smokers that have seen family members die (let me reiterate this... DIE, dead, gone, no more, deceased) due to medical complications directly related to smoking.
3) As a semi-aside to the above, smoking is not a job. It is not a dangerous task one takes on in an attempt to provide for others as say, coal mining (which I've also lost families to due to Pneumoconiosis). While I don't support coal mining, the effect is ONLY to those performing the task, and usually under conditions of employment for earnings.
Let me mention now that I do not believe the smoking of tobacco should be illegal... in your own home or on private property. I don't believe marijuana smoking should be either, but... oh well. I made this comment to my mother-in-law today while discussing an Arizona proposition on the current ballot. She said, "why make criminals out of smokers?" which I replied, "Pooping doesn't make you a criminal, but pooping in the park does."
It's true. You can (and do, I imagine) poop daily. But doing so in public places (other than designated restrooms) is a health hazard to those around you and is thusly unlawful. Why is smoking different?
Smokers are the modern pariah in many ways because of the ultra-assertive defensive mechanisms they mostly display. The more defensive you are about a habit others don't like, the more likely you are to spur equal negative reactions. It costs me tax dollars in health care to support your dying ass on a gurney when you go to the hospital. You have health insurance you say? Great, but all those extra dollars spent that aren't profit for the insurance companies are what drive up premiums for everyone else. You DON'T have insurance? I foot the whole goddamned bill, cigarette taxes be damned.
Now, here comes my hypocrit hat. I OCCASIONALLY smoke hookah as a social event. This meaning roughly once per month. Do I still run the risk of bad lung death due to this? Yes. But I also only do it in my home, with my family not around (unless my wife wants to join me) and it's rare (often, months will go by entirely without a lighting of the hookah, so I do consider it significantly different than a pack-a-day habit, sorry).
In the end, the more you fight and bitch about it, the more people are going to be up in arms against you. *shrug* If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say.
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The prospect of achieving a peace agreement with the extremist group of MILF is almost impossible...
-- Emmanuel Pinol, Governor of Cotobato
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