The "Yes-Smoking Zone"!

Why is everyone hell-bent on stopping us from smoking, I simply don’t understand. As an individual, am I not supposed to have a right to choose what I want to do in my life?

Lemme put it this way:

I smoke.

I know it’s harmful for me.

I don’t urge anybody else to smoke (though I don’t stop ‘em either).

I don’t smoke around anyone who’s a non-smoker and has a problem with the smoke.

So now say, am I doin’ anything wrong?

I don’t think so. For all I know (and technically speaking), like any antismoking lobbyist, I’m a human being completely aware of the ill-effects of smoking and totally in support of prevention of passive-smoking. And you know what; I don’t promote this habit either.

I don’t see where I am going wrong.

It’s not my fault that I love cigarettes, and even though I know it might kill me, I choose to live with it.

It’s just my life, just the way I am.

And thus, just like I don’t force an obese person to go on a diet or a teenager not to indulge in premarital sex, nobody should tell me what to do with my lungs.

Mark Twain summed it up very well in one of his letters to Joseph Twichell:

...when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon -- they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!

And Matthew Perry (as Chandler) in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, made it clear how smoking is a weirdly fantastic habit:

You look happy and sick; you smoked!

Me?

Well I always defend myself as follows:

I don’t smoke.

It’s the cigarette that smokes.

I suck!!