Yes! Raise the taxes on cigarettes. These fools have shown that they will pay any price for their fix. If we tax them enough, maybe everyone else can get a tax break at the state level.

agreed.
drugs are legal in the Netherlands and it doesn't seem to be experiencing many problems.

Obviously I am not suggesting raising taxes on cigarettes is a complete solution, but used with a combination of other prevention measures, it may convince SOME people that smoking isn't worth the price, health wise or financially.

Yea, but the whole point of the war on drugs is to keep drugs off the streets and away from children. I have no problem with decriminalizing small amounts of marajuana for personal use, its when you start decriminalizing and legalizing hard drugs is when you actually make the problem of drug abuse worse not better.

As many of you probably know, I support national health insurance. Just as I believe that such insurance should treat drug addiction, it should also treat addiction to tobacco products. Moreover, American tobacco companies should be forbidden from marketing overseas, where they are now killing people in the third world. Advertising tobacco products should also be made illegal. But no, smoking itself should not be illegal. If smokers are treated by a national health insurance plan, they can become free from their coffin nails without their rights being infringed upon in any way.

Have any of you rabid anti-cigarette zealots thought about what you're going to do for tax money if cigarettes are made illegal?

So... making money from the deaths of 440,000 Americans per year is a good thing, heikstheo?

It is not the government's job to save me from myself; if I die of cancer, I die of cancer; we've all got to die some time. I'm just saying that if you liberal do-gooders succeed in abolishing cigarettes, you'll actually have to pay some taxes yourself.

The government has an obligation to protect us from companies that deliberately make deadly products addictive. Moreover, you are still putting money over lives. Saving a few dollars on your income taxes is apparently more important to you than saving lives.

People on coke aren't that buzzed. In fact the majority of the time they just stare in to space without blinking. The only way cocaine causes crime is when people need money. That's gonna happen whether legal or illegal. At least if legalized (and nationalized, or insanely taxed) drug addiction (and i have to say that's exaggerated, nicotine is 10x more addictive than heroin) would fund the government and not drug dealers. You could easily fund some rehab clinics for those who wanted to quit with the money that'd be received.

But people know it's addictive before they start. If they want to smoke themselves to death then let them.

__________________
What's this i hear bed? Word has it you and Pam are sleeping together.

You have to understand- people who start smoking today are usually very young and naive (they think that they're indestructible). More importantly, I'm not trying to protect people from themselves but rather from tobacco companies. Among their documented strategies is secretly lowering nicotine levels to make people buy more cigarettes (with the same amount of the carcinogenic substances). They are also marketing cigarettes to third-world countries where people don't know that they are deadly. I advocate attacking these vile corporations- not the smokers.