COLUMN: Taxpayers' Dollars: Up in Smoke

From Jeffrey Han "The Central Dogman," Fall '95 From Jeffrey Han "The Central Dogman," Fall '95Do you ever get an intense craving for a cigarette? Maybe waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thinking about your myriad of problems? Or after a big fight with your parents? Luckily, the boons of such an addiction are aplenty. You can impress your friends with 10 different ways to ash. Let's see, there's the tapping with the index finger, the wrist flick, and oh so much more. You can make smoke rings, smoke squares, smoke triangles, or whatever else your mind can imagine. (Don't worry, despite his apparent scrutiny, the guy next to you can't tell the difference.) You can blow smoke out of your nose, ears, eyes and all those other orifices of your body. This is an array of skills so vast and appealing that it's no great wonder why practically everyone has tried smoking, if only for a shining moment in time. There have been societal benefits to smoking through the years as well. The tobacco industry has created millions of jobs and made tons of money for our country. They've donated colorful characters like that cute 'ol Joe Camel and that big stud the Marlboro Man, models of coolness if I've ever seen one. Smoking even shortens the suffering of old age, by killing us off before we go gray. No more worrying about whether you'll end up in a nursing home in the future. With a strict regiment of two packs a day you can drop dead long before that We started running into problems a while back, though. Them damn doctors started getting too good. Now they have all those machines to keep us alive. They have the artificial heart, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and my personal favorite, the respirator. All this trickery has reduced the yearly death total to a paltry 400,000 a year, only one-fifth of total deaths in the United States. And it has jacked up health care costs by at least $50 billion! Fifty billion dollars! That's right, 50 billion dollars! (Uh, you realize that you are all paying for this, right?) But alas, not all is lost. In every evil there is some good. We now have the ability to add yet another marvelous dimension to the realm of smoking -- responsibility. Just slap on a $3 tax for every pack of smokes. Then we will have the ultimate "well rounded" smoker. Not only can he dig his own grave, he can pay for it too. Sounds pretty fair to me. Tobacco industry supporters, never fear. Smoking is hard to quit. Your sales won't suffer too badly. The only thing that this necessitates is some shrewd financial planning. So Billybob over there might have to eat one cheese steak for lunch instead of two. It's a small price to pay for that refreshing coat of tar on his lungs. And as I said above, that Joe Camel is so damn cute! How can little kids resist? While taking up smoking, they are both setting aside money for their future hospital bills and learning the value of saving. What more could you want? Although I'm not much of a smoker, I do not have a problem with it. Second hand smoke doesn't bother me too much. Come to think of it, neither does first hand smoke. RJR can advertise on television or target kids for all I care. They can make a Saturday morning Joe Camel cartoon. I could even go for making tobacco the national plant. Just don't ask me to pay for someone else's self-induced lung cancer bills. So go out and call your local congressman today, before those other non-smokers start making a ruckus about having to always pick up that measly $50 slack. Silence them before it's too late! We wouldn't want to tarnish the stellar image of the tobacco industry, now would we?