November 30th, 2006
Politicians like to bemoan how much money governments have to spend on keeping people alive. People who would be well if they took better care of themselves. Instead they have all kinds of bad habits and get sick, which represents a blow to the economy blahblah. And for that reason, every once in a while, the Minister for Health and others will reiterate how smoking is a serious problem and how they plan to eradicate it through all kinds of campaigns and new regulations they have in mind. Well, they have succeeded in reducing the number of smokers, but the total extinction of smoking is nowhere near fruition. And I don't think that is the campaigns at fault, I think it's smoking itself.
Smoking kills, but it just doesn't kill fast enough. People have all kinds of trouble understanding long term scenarios. If you tell them joining the EU will make the farmers suffer rough competition right now, but in the long run it will modernize and improve the country, after a year they say they want communism back. Long term health problems are that way too, the effect is too far away from the cause that triggers it. And so we need to improve upon that.
We should make smoking kill instantly. That will drastically reduce the number of smokers. It will also reduce the number of obnoxious "look how cool I am" high school kids. And on the packs, instead of printing smoking kills, we print don't believe what you hear, smoking never killed nobody. (Which is actually logically equivalent to the statement smoking always killed everyone, but smokers are way too addicted to think about those labels anyway.)
So let's review the consequences..
- The politicians are happy - smoking kills a lot more people now, but it represents no cost to health care anymore.
- I'm happy - I don't have that mofo blowing smoke into my air.
- The smokers who always wanted to quit, but couldn't, are happy - they finally made it.
- The smokers who said "I don't care if it kills me, it's too good to give up" got what they wanted.
I'm all for it. If you gather 15000 signatures you can put it on parliament's agenda. So far you got 1 :D
You and me will get this law passed in no time. :D
I thought you were against anti-smoking meddling from governements on principle, Erik? :)
The idea has a certain appeal to it alright. The hard part is convincing people that smoking is not cool, any more than diamonds are actually rare and valuable, and it's not like people want to hear. I think I'll leave social education to the professionals. Pity they're such idiots.
Martin - damn your eyes! Alt+s doesn't post here. That's not right damnit!
John, that's not my doing. Wordpress is open source, you can have a word with the powers that be, or submit a patch. :) Come to think of it, Graham said it was Firefox2 doing this. In any case, open source, patch etc ;)