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You should watch Thank You For Smoking. I saw it just the other day--totally hysterical movie, but it puts the whole smoking thing in a totally different context.
According to the film, smoking kills vastly more people than alcohol or firearms. Like orders of magnitude more. I think the number he used was 1300 people a day die from smoking-related illnesses. And that's just the deaths, not the people sick and in treatment.
If you think of all the people in hospitals and undergoing treatment for smoking-related illnesses, and then think of the, what, maybe $1.00/pack tax on cigarettes, it's absurd to think that those taxes cover those medical bills.
You know, it smells bad, and second-hand smoke probably isn't good for those around you. Personally, as an ex-smoker, I'm not too worried about second-hand smoke I might pick up walking down the street or in a bar--I did way worse to myself for many years. I actually like and miss the smell of it.
I smoked a pack a day for ten years. I quit March 1, 2001. I have all kinds of compassion for the nicotine addicts in the world. The thing I noticed immediately when I quit was just how automatic, how robotic I was about it. That first couple days, I was literally having a conversation with myself: "Okay! Time for a smoke! No, dammit, we're not doing that any more. Right, right, fine.... Well, time for a smoke! Damn! No! Stop that! Okay, okay... Whew, sure could go for a smoke right now! Dammit!" So, you know, I've been clean for more than five years now, and I still get waves of cravings.
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