Despite the government\'s efforts, people keep smoking – so what
does our eagerness to make them suffer say about us?

Source: The Guardian (uk)
Date: 2010-02-02
Author: * Charlotte Gore

Andy Burnham has set himself the almighty challenge of halving
the number of smokers, from a fifth of the population to a tenth.
The hope is that this is like any other target – that with
sufficient political will and enough public sector workers given
the responsibility to turn the dream into a reality, anything can
be accomplished. For the good of the state, a few individuals are
going to have to change their ways.

I wonder whether Burnham understands the nature of the challenge
he has undertaken for his government on your behalf. The question
is a significant one: is the state powerful enough to overcome an
individual\'s extreme reluctance to part themselves from a
substance addictive enough to have people plucking cigarette ends
out of gutters in desperation?

How much humiliation, degradation and punishment is it necessary
to inflict on a person before stopping smoking, with all the side
effects and difficulties faced by those who do, becomes the path
of least resistance? Smoking isn\'t a habit – it\'s a chemical
dependency that causes changes in an individual\'s brain chemistry
that are not easily – or quickly – reversed. It is an
addiction with well-known long-term consequences that start with
shortness of breath and end in premature, horrible, painful
death.

Yet people continue to smoke. They stop when they want to stop,
on their own terms . . .

nothing compares to the suffering this level of taxation, often
on the poorest in society – causes. This level of taxation can
only happen because tobacco is addictive and the demand isn\'t
influenced by price. . . .

Then the cigarettes themselves cause more pain than any
photograph of a corpse on a packet, or an advert on television
giving smokers\' children nightmares that their parents could die
at any minute ever could. Caught in this triple hell of physical,
financial and social suffering, smokers still keep smoking. It\'s
staggering. It all simply goes away if they stop smoking, yet
they do not.