by Bobby Watson

Created on: March 19, 2009

I have been a smoker for 17 years, and I also would like to say no to having designated smoking areas at a hospital type facility. I think it's even kind of disrespectful to smoke around a hospital. Even all the smokers know that smoking causes cancer and a number of other health problems, and that secondhand smoking can be just as bad for anyone around us. Hospitals are places that everyone relies on for healthy medical treatment with the objective of making us all healthier. We owe it to them to save our own unhealthy, bad habits for a more appropriate setting. Hospital employees should save their smoke breaks for lunch or other time off periods that they can get away from the hospital. These are medical professionals that should know more than anyone else about the dangers of smoking and why you should quit.

I know what the debate title is, but this subject is about something much bigger. Smoking will some day be eradicated within the United States, or too costly for anybody in the middle class or lower class. I live in Tucson, Arizona,and it is no longer legal to smoke in a bar or pub. Restaurants and other businesses are banning smoking from their areas of operation as well. I am probably not like most other smokers. When laws making smoking more inaccessible and expensive are passed, it actually makes me happy. Today I went to buy a carton of cigarettes at a local tobacco barn on an Indian reservation and paid $46 for a carton of Marlboro Reds. This is supposed to be the cheapest deal in town for tobacco products of any kind. That is a more than seven dollar increase from just two weeks before. My mental threshold for financing this habit has been breached. I can no longer in good conscience spend that kind of money on a habit that will probably kill me someday. The price of cigarettes has steadily gone up for years and it was never enough for me to even consider stopping. But, a brand-new tax increase of almost 1 dollar per pack sure made me think this time. The federal government finally did enough to make me change my mind about continuing this bad habit.

The greatest thing about America is freedom. If it was just about the freedom to make the decision to possibly harm yourself with the habit of smoking I could see fighting for that right. Unfortunately we now know that smoking is detrimental to anyone around us who breathes in the air we exhale. Our freedom does not give us the right to harm the health of others for our own selfish reasons. We knew

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