Thank You for Smoking
Peter Brimelow at LewRockwell.com - don't expect the smoking anti-nazis to tell you about the benefits, to some, of smoking. Do they out-weight the harms? Don't know. But liberty is supposed to be about the ability of each person to decide that for him or herself. [lew]
None of these health benefits is enough to persuade doctors to recommend occasional cigarettes, in the way that some now occasionally recommend a glass of wine.
But consider this theoretical possibility: Should 60-year-olds take up smoking because its protection against Alzheimer's is more immediate that its potential damage to the lungs, which won't show up for 30 years if at all?
A theoretical possibility and likely to remain theoretical. Research into possible benefits of tobacco and nicotine is widely reported to be stymied by the absolutist moral fervor of the antismoking campaign.
...
Which leaves smokers defenseless against a second typically American disease: the epidemic of power hungry puritanical bigots.
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