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Smokers are the last minority that it is legal to sneer at, provoke, blame, punish and treat with extreme prejudice. You can call them names, relegate them to the spaces beside the trash cans in dark alleys and generally make their already bleak lives a further living hell.

Smokers didn't start smoking for fun. The vast, thundering majority of smokers started because when they were teenagers, they hoped they were going to look cool or be accepted by a certain group of people. Cigarette advertising is almost exclusively aimed at young people. If you were told that after persevering and learning to tolerate nicotine to the point where you could actually smoke it without throwing up, that 40 years later you would be a stinking pariah with bad breath, poor health and enslaved to the tobacco companies, who would ever start?

Smokers have been lied to, poisoned and impoverished by tobacco companies. The golden visions of a Greta Garbo or Humphrey Bogart smoking cigarettes fades into unreality as lung and heart disease not to mention negative social stigma take over. Smoking is an addiction as bad as heroin addiction. With other drug addictions, there is help available, there are safe injection sites and detox centers and social service people crawling out of the woodwork to help you get straight.

Cigarette smokers are simply punished and abused.

Cigarette packaging is designed to fit easily into your hand or pocket or thanks to Marlon Brando, tucked into your t-shirt sleeve. Cigarettes are designed so that there is enough nicotine to keep a smoker going for 45 minutes. Almost everyone who smokes, smokes a package a day. The tobacco companies have designed it that way. The highest nicotine brands are the brands aimed at children.

In the 80's they began to add the chemicals to tobacco to increase the "free base" component. That makes the nicotine hit the brain quicker, and harder with less tobacco, making cigarettes cheaper to produce and even more addictive. If this kind of product manipulation had been done to breakfast cereal or ice cream, the companies would have been closed down in a heartbeat.

Smokers have been profoundly brainwashed- both on TV and in the movies. Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando have already been mentioned. But what about Cruella DeVille, thin, rich and powerful? And a smoker. Bruce Willis is a totally cool-smoker. Sharon Stone, a powerful, in control, beautiful, thin, smoker. It is a fact that cigarette companies pay screenwriters to write in smoking parts in the movies.

All the non-smokers out there who blame smokers as weak willed and to blame for their own addiction had best beware. If smokers must bear the responsibility for the health risks of cigarette smoking, who is next? Fat people? The children of mothers who drank while pregnant? People who drive too fast or too much? Dog owners? If "bearing responsibility" means paying for all health costs as a result of an action, this is a very slippery slope.

It would be a far, far better plan to require government help for this addiction. Quit smoking aids and seminars are not tax deductible as they should be. Smoking has a lifetime cost of over $100,000. The government does not really want smokers to quit, because sixty percent of that is tax. If they really, really wanted smokers to stop, they would take the tax money and instead of putting it into general revenue, direct it toward actively helping smokers to quit.

Learn more about this author, Sharon Jackson.
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