All of those illnesses you will now be paying for. Actually, through your insurance, you already are.

It costs you years of life — lost time not spent with children and grandchildren. My father smoked all his life, until his heart attack at 52 forced him to quit. (Six months in a hospital bed will help with that.) And then his (previously repaired) aneurysm in his heart blew out 14 years later, six weeks before my sister would have told him she was pregnant — at Christmas.

My father missed all of his grandchildren. They’ll never meet him, because he smoked.

Who are YOU going to never meet?

Isn’t it worth learning to deal with your own anger without a crutch, so that you can meet that special small someone someday?

Smoking has cost me dearly. If you can’t see what it could cost you, for an emotional crutch that you’d need to give up in order to really know whether you need it or not, then you need to open your eyes and look a little harder.

What is the “interesting statistic”?

What is your source of stats?

What is the life expectancy of an indigenous American?

Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis make up around 78 per cent of the Asian population and all of them have an average life expectancy far less than America. So what do you mean by “maintain better health than us?”

To draw conclusions on tobacco and general global health you have to normalize other comparative national factors such as: alcohol consumption, consumption of other drugs, the quality of food, economic conditions, demographics, levels of violence, sedentary lifestyle, climate, etc.

You are saying “Tobacco is obviously not that bad for us”, are you saying that decades of medical research by qualified doctors, biologists and other scientists are invalid?

So yes, insisting that they stop smoking IN THAT ENVIRONMENT, just because you don’t approve of their habit, is persecution.