I mainly post these because there are some interesting statistics, insights, and yes, spin, on what are sometimes called smoker's rights.

I started smoking when I was at Rice, smoked for 6 years, reaching 2.5-3 packs/day, and then spent the next 6 years quiting, eventually succeeding. Tobacco is a tough addition. I imagine most, maybe all of our posters here are nonsmokers.

One little irony - it occured to me that we could term the smoker's rights advocates as pro-choice, the anti-smoking crowd as pro-life. That's as far as I want to carry that, though.

If insurance subsidies are funded by cigarette taxes, and the taxes reduce demand, where will future subsidy increases come from? If smoking were somehow eliminated (shades of Prohibition!), how would we fund the needs of an increasing elderly population, especially under a national healthcare plan? OTOH, who can be for illness and death?

I don't smoke, so this is no-skin-off-my-nose...yet. I don't have a dog in this relatively minor fight, but it does present interesting dilemmas.

http://www.star-telegram.com/225/story/1432915.html

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/1439923.html

Interesting.
I never smoked cigarettes. I smoked cigars and a pipe because they were supposed to be safer. They're not, so I quit.
To the extent insurance claims are smoking related, reduced smoking related subsidies may be offset.

To paraphrase Holmes, your right to smoke ends where my nose begins.

There are a lot of other people's rights that end where my nose (ears, eyesight) begins.

Back when i first started playing casino poker, there were not any nonsmoking policies. If you wanted to play, you put up with it. I rationalized it away by telling myself that smoking displayed a lack of judgement and a lack of discipline, and who else would you want to face across the poker table than undisciplined players with bad judgement? Alas, I was never able to correlate smoking and bad play. I guess bad jusgement in one area of one's life does not neccesarily translate into bad judgement in others.

Now, nearly every poker room is nonsmoking to some extent, asking players to step away from the table or to completely leave the room. I hear few complaints. Ironically, IMO, the players who do leave a tournament for a while to have a smoke are self-penalizing, as time away from the table is the penalty for bad behavior.

Most of the smokers i know would like to quit, sorta, just not enough to actually do it. Yet they will gripe about being second-class citizens and to a man are upset that new taxes on cigarettes are enacted.

Life insurance is cheaper for nonsmokers, I presume because of a projected greater life expectancy. I wonder if the reverse is true for long term care policies.

Since the FDA now has this broad authority over cigarettes, its going to be interesting to see how long the Tobacco industry survives.

Between increased state and federal taxes, and massive regulation, I don't think it will be more than five years.

I'm sure that there will be a proposal at some date for some insane tax ($3.00 per pack) on cigarettes to help pay for Obama's Health Care Program.

There will be a point that people just can't afford it.

Actually, I read something somewhere that made sense: that the regs were as much about the strong staying strong. Basically, this will likely weed out the smaller, less efficient operations, and allow the big guys to still stick around. The big guys with the lobbying money made sure of it - if there was going to be regulation and potentially higher taxes, they wanted to make sure the little guys weren't exempted in some way, which in many ways could be more onerous.

Congress has the power to ban smoking. However, they have their own addiction, as others have noted - tobacco taxes. Oh, and reelection, too.