What is the greatest tragedy of our time?
We talk about building for the future, pushing the human race forward and leaving our dent on the universe. If there’s one thing I want to achieve during my fleeting moment, it’s for my grandchildren to grow up in a world where tobacco is not even a consideration. I want to eradicate the disease of tobacco addiction and confine it to the abstractions of the past; an old and antiquated practice and as bizarrely backward as this advertisement from the 40’s:
Or as strange as this video warning people of homosexuals:
Tobacco has killed more people than the bubonic plague. It kills more people each year than any current pandemic or inadvertently spread disease. Three times as many people die from smoking related illnesses each year than HIV/AIDS. We’re essentially producing HIV/AIDS en masse and selling it to kids. We can stop it all tomorrow. Imagine we had the ability to do that with Malaria or Hepatitis? Imagine we had the cure for those diseases. Surely we’d start administering them immediately. Well, we have the cure for this disease and it’s purely a legislative decision, not a biological endemic. it’s baffling in so many ways.
I don’t blame the smokers, you can’t; they are obviously the victims here. I blame the tobacco companies and spineless governments the pander to lobbying. Simply put, the production and sale of tobacco is a crime against humanity.
Not that money has any relevance here, the argument that there’s a profit to be made from the revenue tax is disgusting and bogus. In Ireland, an example of a western democracy. The importation tax reported by the revenue commission exactly equals the estimated cost of treating and caring for those with smoking related illnesses.
Check out this crock of shit:
While it may be desirable from a public health perspective to abolish smoking, the €1bn in excise revenue from tobacco would be a significant loss from the fiscal perspective.”
Economics of Tobacco: Modelling the Market for Cigarettes in Ireland (PDF)
Now read this statistic from The Department of Health, Ireland:
It costs us €1 Billion per year to provide health services for smokers.”
The incompetence of our elected government is literally killing us.
So, if you lack empathy and you’re looking at it from a purely financial perspective —which is frankly, an insult— we’re just about breaking even.
At some point, people will look back on our generation of human history, and they’ll wonder how in all our scientific enlightenment we couldn’t sooner conclude the logical necessity to immediately eradicate the tobacco problem.
We are being duped and it’s tragic.