Let’s stop smokers killing normal people

Not even these packets will stop the cigarette junkies

There was a time when TV programmes had people smoking on them.  Ok, so they still smoke in dramas and soaps, but in studio discussions, talk shows, etc., where the people were ‘themselves’ they would also be surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke.  It was an acceptable vice, and made people look important.

Then, apart from the Health and Safety aspects of studios needing to not catch fire, it became unfashionable to see smoking during news and discussion shows and it made the participants look weak.  Indeed, after a smoker set fire to London’s Kings Cross underground station killing 31, it became extremely unfashionable to see smokers who, quite rightly, started to be equated with murderers.

Smokers are thankfully a dying breed.  Literally, thankfully.  Unfortunately, they also keep killing normal people too.  Apart from that constantly awful stench on their breath, their clothes, and their shrivelled facial skin, yellow teeth and wheezing cough, smokers are some of the dirtiest and muckiest anti-social people in our society.

The debris smokers leave behind

It is beneath smokers to extinguish their drug when they have finished with it.  They will usually leave it burning when they’ve completed their fix of the moment, setting fire to anything it may have rolled against. They don’t watch to see where it may have rolled.  They don’t care. They will litter areas with used but still burning cigarettes rather than extinguishing them and disposing of them thoughtfully, such is their selfishness.  A gaggle of smokers taking time off work (Why are they still paid for these long breaks? Surely they’ve absented themselves from work, leaving the ordinary people behind to cover for them without being paid extra?) will make far more mess in a morning than a swarm of nesting pigeons in a week.  Why?  Aren’t humans supposed to know better?

Slowly people are becoming normal and the amount using cigarettes is reducing.  Sadly, not enough smokers are dying outright.  Yes, a heck of a lot are, but the majority are costing us a fortune as the NHS keeps patching them up, when really we should just let them die from the lifestyle choice they’ve made.

We will never stop people smoking, because children who are at an essentially stupid and impressionable age will always use the drug in order to conform to what they think they should be doing in order to look big.  I see 8, 9 and 10 year olds smoking as they go to school every morning.  They don’t look big, they aren’t hard, they just look very very childish.  It’s only when they are older that they realise that normal people don’t smoke, but by then it’s too late.  They are hooked, with every penny of their pocket money now going straight to feed very rich and smug tobacco barons who live off the dying cigarette suckers. Brilliant.

We can’t actually ‘ban’ cigarettes or tobacco.  It would only make it more popular.  What we can do is educate and inform, but most importantly, control the fashionability of the cigarette.  If it was truly unfashionable amongst school-children then the point at which the naive are introduced to the drug would be interrupted.  Adults are far less likely to start smoking.  Adults that smoke usually started whilst they were at school.

The problem with going into a school and saying something is wrong is that it immediately makes it right. So, what should be the approach?  It’s not working with respect to bullying.  No matter how much children are taught that bullying is wrong or shown the consequences, they will bully.  Some statistics suggest bullying is getting worse and far more intrusive because of Blackberry messaging, texting, and Facebook.  The victims can’t get away from what was once just reserved for them in the school corridor.

And so, with smoking, the more we try to explain it is a bad thing and how smokers are one of the evils in our society, the more we make it sound like it might be fun. And, a bit like how most smokers who are too self-important to put their cigarettes out after use, I can’t see the way forward to stamp it out.