HOOKED ON TOBACCO MONEY

I'M 50 years old and I smoke. I did not begin as a teenager, although my
father smoked (since quit), and I don't think that advertising ever
influenced me to start (more collegiate pressure, I think) or continue
smoking. I quit for 13 years and started again, quit and started, quit and
started again. No smoker I know ever believed the tobacco companies' line
that it's not addictive.

I don't smoke in a restaurant because I feel that it's bad manners to smoke
while others are eating. But I'm smoking in my own home as I write this,
one of the last bastions of smokers (unless you have children or a spouse
who will take you to court for reckless
endangerment). Enough said.

The current arguments in the House and Senate concerning a ``settlement''
with the tobacco companies are a spurious and self-serving bunch of
garbage. Why so? It's all about money. If, as has finally been admitted,
tobacco is as addictive as it is, it should be outlawed as marijuana,
heroin, cocaine and other drugs are. The only reason for continuing the
legalization of tobacco is not the tobacco companies' lobbyists, but the
taxes that government, from the federal level to the city level, receives
from tobacco sales. Money is the true addictive substance here.

What happens when the grand agenda of zero use of tobacco products is
achieved? How do we replace our addiction to the tax revenue they produce?
Do we really want our schools or health care funded by an ever-reducing
number of smokers? These are the proposals we face, and I find them
wanting.

I have often bemoaned the fact that tobacco products are sold everywhere I
go, whatever the store may be, so that it's harder for me to quit, once and
for all. I bemoan the fact that no one can save me from myself. But that's
the point, isn't it? No one can. It's my responsibility, and no one else's.

- -- Greg Crooks

Santa Clara