Garth George writes that cigarettes are a tax windfall, and denying smokers medical attention is hypocritical.
When you've made as many mistakes in as much of your life as I did, there is always a temptation to ask yourself the question: "If I had my life over again, what would I change?"
I discovered, as I suspect many others have before me, that this is a futile exercise. To live in the past is to miss the present.
After a couple of years of on-and-off introspection in my late 30s I concluded that there were just two things I would change: I would never start smoking; and I would look after my own teeth.
That view hasn't changed 30-odd years on as I find myself within a few weeks of reaching three score years and 10.
There was nothing to be done about the teeth. I had at that time had false teeth for more than a decade. They were the bane of my life then, and remain so today.
No matter how hard they try, dentists and their technicians can never get my bottom plate to fit properly so I am deprived of the pleasure of eating anything crunchy, such as nuts and cereals and even fruits and jams with pips in them, and my apple a day - which I eat, of course, to keep the doctor away - has to be peeled and sliced before I can enjoy it.
However, way back then I did fall for the increasingly strident (even in those days) propaganda that I should give up fags. After countless vain and demoralising attempts I realised that there was no reason in the world why I should deprive myself of the pleasure of cigarettes.
So I gave up trying to give up until, in my early 60s, I decided, for reasons I can no longer remember, to give it another try.
Within the first three months, in spite of watching my diet and power-walking for half an hour five days a week, I put on 10kg in weight. No matter what I tried the weight would not come off and my obese, pot-gutted life became a real trial, affecting everything from my bodily functions to my moods to walking to driving the car.
After 14 months I decided that I was much worse off as a non-smoker than I had ever been as a smoker and restarted. And that experience has kept me from ever trying again to give up.
As with everything else I do, I take full responsibility for my smoking. I have learned to play by the rules, although that is rather difficult since the smoking police keep shifting the goalposts and inflating the costs. Here in Rotorua you can't even smoke in public parks, in spite of the squillions of square metres of fresh air around and above.
And I look with vast amusement upon the machinations of those whose lives are so empty that they have constantly to be telling others what they should or shouldn't be doing, backing their positions on their various soap-boxes often with shonky statistics which contain no hint of detailed scientific statistical evidence and which naive and gullible people accept without question.
But even if these baldly stated "statistics" and "surveys" are genuine, so what? If I die a few years before I might have, what is that to anyone but me? It certainly means nothing to me; I'll go, and I hope cheerfully, when God calls my name.
And if smoking causes me to need medical attention - radical or otherwise - so what? Over my working and smoking life I have paid in taxes, especially tobacco taxes, vastly more than the cost of even the most expensive operations.
Why should arrogant medical professionals threaten to deny me and my fellow smokers treatment when we have been contributing up to $1 billion a year to their paymasters which, with the latest unconscionable increase engineered by stomach-stapled Nanny Tariana, will rise to about $1.25 billion?
The cost of a packet of 20 of my regular brand of cigarettes has gone up by a shocking $1.40, which works out at about $8 a week. Fortunately, I can live with that, but my heart goes out to those who rely totally on national superannuation for their income.
I reckon the Government should build in to the SuperGold card, which we over-65s carry round with us, a discount on tobacco products equivalent to the amount of tax on each packet. Either that or allow us to buy our smokes at duty-free stores on production of our card.
By now you will all be asking why on Earth I decided that if I had my time over again I wouldn't start smoking.
Simple, really: any fool can figure out that the benefits of never having smoked must far outweigh the benefits of being or having been a smoker. Any young person who starts is a mug.
garth.george@hotmail.com
