I Hate the Merchants of Death

Pretty dumb stunt, right? But it’s an even bet this kid will never try that stupid human trick again. Not so with smoking, which is just one reason why I hate it, and why smoking is really, really, really stupid and dangerous: it’s potentially lethal, yet it’s done over and over again, thousands of times.

I don’t like to admit this, but I think of smokers in general as uneducated morons. Unfortunately, statistics bear out my view. The more education someone has, the less likely they are to smoke:

NOTE: the percentages add up to more than 100 because they aren’t a percentage of all smokers, just of the groups shown. In other words, 6.3% of all people with a postgraduate degree smoke, 9.9% of people with an undergraduate degree smoke, 45.2% of people with a GED smoke, etc.

The truth is, however, that plenty of very intelligent people smoke. Smoking is fundamentally an addiction issue, not an intelligence issue. Smokers are drug addicts, not morons. Nicotine is extremely addictive. Back in the day, I produced a monthly newsletter called Drugs at Work. I interviewed many addicts and former addicts. More than once someone told me they had successfully conquered their addition to cocaine, heroin, meth, LSD, PCP, alcohol, etc, but not cigarettes. (Pharmacologically speaking, nicotine addiction is most similar to heroin and cocaine addition.) That situation has only gotten worse: one clinical analysis has shown an average increase of 1.6% per year in the nicotine content of American-brand cigarettes between 1998 and 2005. That increase amounts to a deliberate and diabolical campaign by tobacco companies to make it harder for you to stop using their deadly products.

And that’s why, as much as I hate smoking, I hate tobacco companies even more. In my view, they’re pure evil. To them, profits are all-important, even if they come at the cost of the health and even the very lives of their customers, millions of them. Evil.

Please see also: http://www.augustarx.com/news/?p=808