Well, I was going to spend the morning catching up on my blog reading, but these two posts over at Silver Blue's got me ranting, and rather that fill his comments with invective I figured I'd let loose over here in my well-appointed, Pixy Misa-provided space.
I never really paid much attention to stories about Napster or MP3's because I don't download music, and I hardly ever buy CDs because my car radio is tuned to the Oldies station and I already have Emerson Lake and Palmer and Billy Idol on CD. But if by some bizarre chance I should decide I needed to buy a new CD, there is NO WAY IN HELL I would pay 19.99 for it! Heck, I won't even pay that much for a DVD! If a movie I want costs more than $20 on DVD, I buy it on VHS.
The problem, you see, is disposable income. I don't have very much of it, and so what I do have is spent mostly on those regressive cigarettes taxes that are supposedly intended to stop teenagers from smoking.
CLUE alert: Teenagers are the only ones who can afford to pay $5.00 for a pack of cigarettes! Mommy and Daddy pay for their housing, clothes, utilities, and usually car and car insurance too. Teenagers probably have more discretionary income than Bill Gates, who no doubt has most of his funds tied up in a few business ventures. So anybody who wants to get a "sluggish" economy going again needs to get serious about repealing federal and state excise taxes on cigarettes. And before some idiotarian jumps in to comment that the money goes to repay the state for medical expenses for lung cancer victims, let me pre-emptively say "Bullshit!".
If smoking "causes" cancer, why hasn't every smoker who ever lived gotten it? My mom's dad smoked camel straits til the day he died of stroke at age 83. My beloved Aunt Letty who started smoking in the 1950s was 82 when she passed away from complications from a stroke a few years ago. Both my parents, who are 75 and 73, have smoked all of their adult lives. (Dad was actually 13 when he started smoking, so he has been a smoker for 62 years--and if he should happened to develop lung cancer anytime soon I suspect that the fact that as a child he had annual chest x-rays for TB might have something to do with it). Several of mom's sisters, who are currently in their late 80's, are smokers.
Two of my Dad's other sisters also died of stroke, at ages 76 and 81--but neither of them ever smoked (and one joined the convent in 1943, so "second-hand" smoke cannot be blamed for her death!). Geneticly speaking, I am far more likely to die of "natural causes" or accident than smoking-induced cancer.
On the other hand, people whose families have a genetic propensity toward cancer would probably be wise to not smoke, just to be on the safe side. But making me pay more because they have defective genes is not fair or reasonable!
Frigging democrats....it's all that socialist Howard Dean's fault....
Freely admitting my ignorance...
I propose the possibility that smoking makes you more -susceptible- to said lung cancers, realizing that I have no idea if this is true. It would be a realistic answer if the wider trend bears out, especially if there's a correlation between frequency and susceptibility.
Of course, I'm someone who doesn't smoke, period, and won't because I'm allergic to cigarette smoke.
But I know my grandfather still lights up once in a great while when he's off by himself; I also know it's very rare, and he doesn't, to my knowledge, have any smoking-related cancers despite having smoked since he was in the Army, if not before.
Posted by: Dave at September 10, 2003 03:22 PMif it takes 40 to 50 years of smoking to develop cancer, how many years would it take for someone to get cancer from second-hand smoke?
Posted by: Rob at September 10, 2003 03:57 PMWhen I was a teenager, I used to have to use my lunch money to buy my daily pack of cigarettes. After I got grown, during college I had to choose between whether to buy a pack of cigarettes or whether to eat lunch. Thankfully, I have a fairly good career going on, but for some reason, I still find I can either afford to eat lunch or afford to buy a pack of cigarettes, but not both. I suspect there is a secret conspiracy to keep the price of cigarettes at just the point where I cannot afford to buy a pack and also be able to pay for lunch.
Posted by: Tiger at September 10, 2003 06:42 PM