Smoking & Drinking
Have you noticed how hard the anti-smoking campaigns are pushing recently? I’m not complaining (much), I still smoke and know I need to quit, but…
I have lost five personal friends or relatives – that’s people I actually knew, not people I heard about – to alcohol. I know nobody that’s died from smoking. In fact, I don’t even indirectly know of anybody that’s died from smoking. Am I a statistical anomoly? Or are we aiming our health-awareness budget at the wrong target?
Smoking is nasty, dirty, smelly and evil. Fine. I’m not arguing that point. And it’s bad for you. OK, conceded. But how many people are unfit to drive after having a few too many fags? Or beat their wives in a nicotene-fueled rage? Molest children, piss on the streets, throw up on the bus or wake the neighbours singing football songs?
Try to get medical attention at your local A&E late on a Friday night (or early Saturday morning), and you will sit and wait for hour after hour while the evening’s drunken detritus is tidied away. Bar fights, car accidents, alcohol poisoning and just plain falling down. That’s what the hospitals have to deal with. A tired old man having a little trouble breathing will have to sit (surrounded by vomit, probably) and wait his turn. No criticism of the hospital staff intended, they work very hard with very little and I salute them. It just seems a shame that so much resource is used on what is essentially a self-inflicted condition.
Are smokers a softer target than alcohol abusers? Why are they the focus of so much venom?
I don’t have the answers, just the questions. Do you have the answers? Or anything else to say on this topic? Register (it’s free and painless, I promise) and leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
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Double Standards.
I find fermented & alcohol fuelled people and their breath offensive.
Ask for the smoking section and you’re looked at like you’re from the planet Zog.
I had the displeasure of being seated on a return flight next to someone who’d had a drink whilst being tired. The snoring and the stink breath – is that supposed to be OK?
Alcohol is dished out with abandon on flights but anyone caught smoking will be asked to leave immediately (at 8000m), but you can be drunk, disorderly, wipe entire families out with your drunk ass at the wheel, you can beat up your wife, act like a complete ass and not remember a thing the next day – and that’s OK. Double Standards.
Reputations and families are destroyed by consumption of alcohol and another one for the road.
But havin’a fag is frowned upon.