Much discussion is made on the health aspects of smoking, however a more fundemental aspect is always overlooked. Even it were to be proved that passive smoking didn't cause a significant physical harm to the health of innocent bystanders, what about the sheer offence that this ugly perversion causes to all decent people who have to endure it from others in pubs, clubs, streets and a host of other public places?
Even when we don't have to breath acrid poisoned air or have our fresh clean clothes and hair tainted with the stench of stale kippers, the sight of some mindless sociopath deriving so-called 'pleasure' out of dragging that unnatural filth into their lungs is a disgusting and degrading spectacle to have to witness during our precious, hard earned recreation time.
I wonder what public opinion would be if copraphillia (the practice of deriving erotic pleasure from eating one's partner's excrement) became a widespread practice in public places? Unlike their nicotine-sucking counterparts, at least the stool-eating variety of copraphilliac doesn't force-feed the object of their perversion down the necks of anyone trying to enjoy a night out near them!
Has anyone ever addressed the astounding disregard that smokers show to those they offend? - and questioned whether their concience can be functioning normally if they can commit this act without a thought towards other people or the standards of decency and intelligence they are setting for themselves?
By its nature, smoking is an artificial back-door escape from having to face the stresses of adult life - from accountability to one's adult responsibilities, and those who practice it band together and give each other permission in the face of opposition, making them still less accountable to any standards of human decency. It is no surprise that in the UK alone, seventeen thousand little children of five and under are admitted to hospital each year after having involuntarily inhaled cigarette smoke into their delicate lung tissues. 'This is the tip of the iceberg', a record of child abuse that even the paedophile community would struggle to compete with.
Can we really justify the double standards of criminalising prostitution (ultimately serving a healthy and natural human function), while allowing something as grotesque as the nicotine perversion to go on legally so it can generate millions for the government in taxation?
Let's follow the advice of the lancet – Britain’s premier medical journal – and criminalise this mindless sickness once and for all - and if necessary allow ladies of the night to provide the government with that lost revenue instead. If there's still a shortfall requiring our taxes being raised by a few quid a week, let's pay it with relish and gratitude. What we'll get in return will be the best bargain the government will ever have given us!!