If I want to have a cigarette in a the car park, that might irritate (although goodness knows why) non-smokers, but shouldn't they just get over it for my sake?
It doesn't work that way, I know. The UK, at least, is a country full of angry people who believe that everybody else should do things their way. That society should make allowances for them, not that they should make allowances for society.
A bit more tolerance and the world would be a better place.
Quite, I think you've hit upon the key point. There's three groups of people I find, smokers, non smokers and anti-smokers. Now I'm in the middle category and I really couldn't care less what other people do with their time, but plenty who don't smoke are in the third category. They don't smoke because they personally don't like it but feel everybody else should be banned from doing it by a totalitarian state (or the Labour Party, which is the same thing). These are the people who complain when Hospitals set up smoking zones (which themselves were probably set up due to complaints of people smoking all over the place) because they don't think they should be allowed to smoke at all.
They may pay a lot in tax, but they cost the National Health Service a hell of a lot in treatment. Do you have any idea of the cost of cancer or heart disease treatment?
No more than alcohol related illness but we don't put beer in plain brown paper hidden under the counter do we? No, it's stacked 17 boxes high the moment you walk in the supermarket.
If we're going to boil this down to a pathetic argument of who pays more than I'll say the worst ones are people who eat all the green nonsense and try to live to 125. They cost the country a fortune in pensions, elderly care bills, false hips, eye operations, winter fuel payments, free TV licences, free bus passes etc etc etc the list goes on. If someone wants to live in a way which gets them off the pension bill sooner than I am in support of their actions. Baby boomers expecting 30 year retirements subsidised by the generation they screwed over have more to answer for than smokers.
The fact is the Government gets around £9billion a year from tobacco duty and the Government would soon want that £9billion back if every smoker was to quit. Smokers quitting wouldn't reduce the NHS bill, too many public sector bureaucrats with vested interests to prevent that money going back to the taxpayer, so arguments about how much smokers 'cost' the NHS are silly because you're never getting that money back even if they quit. Even if the Treasury did get it back they'd still want an extra £9billion and would just tax something else instead. Petrol probably. With that in mind I would imagine for a smoker it feels like a total mickey-take that the Government pretend to be so anti-smoking.
The smoking ban itself was badly thought through, another example of Government trying to control people and boss everybody around. I can see the sense in banning smoking in places like McDonalds where there's children, but to ban it in country pubs and places where adults visit is overkill, adults can decide for themselves whether to go in or not. The anti smokers always say 'oh it used to be horrible with people smoking over you' which makes me wonder why - if it was so horrible - they kept going to these places. Why didn't they stay at home if they hated it that much? Another example of people going out of their way to complain about something.
No sympathy for smokers at all . Tends to be the uneducated or fatalistic who partake
Funny, given how you need almost a mid-range income to afford smoking these days. I've been to posh stately homes-cum-restaurant/hotels and witnessed incredibly wealthy, grown up individuals all have to huddle outside the 400 year old mansion for a cigarette, like children behind the bike shed. Is this necessary? I think not.
There's plenty of stuff I hate, but Government constantly bossing people around is very high up the list, along with it's socialist (usually anti-smoking) supporters who want a totalitarian state to ban everything they don't like just because they don't think other people should have lives of their own. That is top of the list.
'Ban everything I don't like but keep things I do like.' Somebody should shoot these people.
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