I don't think smoking was entirely a choice people made. Not like whether to buy a t-shirt. Or a choice is made, but we have to recognize that it wasn't an easy one. Making some 16 year old taking up smoking a moral issue--well, I don't know. And you can't help, later, that when you were 16 you didn't have the Wisdom of the Ages, I mean, who does, and you've got this whole addiction going on. I tried to take up smoking when I was younger. I was lucky, it just ramped up my asthma. Smoke a cigarette, I get inflamed and my breathing isn't as good for a week or two. I got the same problem once working with loose hay, I was sick for weeks.


My mom has COPD. You can blame this on her smoking, but growing up when she did, I don't think you can rightly place a moral blame here. Sometimes I hear comments when people are outside hospitals with oxygen tanks and cigarettes. My brother in law had a quadruple bypass a few years ago, patient in the next bed was going on about wanting to get out of there and eat some decent food--by which he meant junk food. There are very reasonable, selfish reasons to cease these behaviours--which speaks to the strength of the drives/addictiveness of the behaviours. I don't think morality is the right framework here.



Smoking is the normal consequence of normal people living in abnormal, smokigenic environments.