Yet I consider my mother-in-law...she has that classic smoker's disease, emphysema - yet never smoked.
EIGHTEEN dollars for a packet of 20 cigarettes, thanks (or no thanks) to New Year tobacco tax rises. You'd think, surely that's got to hit you in the pocket. Surely that has to be an incentive to give up.
Since I've never smoked, it's difficult to comment with much sincerity
on nicotine addiction.
There was a time, perhaps a decade ago, when militant anti-smokers would get all righteous and huffy over second-hand smoke in their general vicinity. But lately I haven't seen much of that, perhaps because the battle against smoking is definitely - albeit slowly - being won by the anti-tobacco lobby. In a societal and cultural sense, it's a slowly fading pastime.
I've never really given a toss about people smoking. My father smoked a pipe and my mother had the occasional cigarette, so my associations with smoking weren't unpleasant. I also felt, borrowing a phrase of my mother's, that people could choose their own road to hell, as long as it didn't affect me.
Alcohol is unarguably more destructive because of assaults and drink-driving. If people want to smoke, look 65 at the age of 50, have bad blood circulation past middle age and take two minutes to gasp across a pedestrian crossing in their 70s, well, as long as I'm not waiting at that crossing, I'm generally fine.
