Word: tobaccos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...oddest thing about the current national crusade against tobacco is not its frenzy--our culture lives from one frenzy to the next--but its selectivity. Of course tobacco is a great national killer. It deserves all the pummeling it gets. But alcohol is a great national killer too, and it has enjoyed an amazingly free ride amid the fury of the New Prohibitionism...
...most plausible answer is that tobacco is worse because it kills more people. Indeed it does. But 100,000 people a year is still a fair carnage. Moreover, the really compelling comparison is this: alcohol is far more deadly than tobacco to innocent bystanders. In a free society, should we not consider behavior that injures others more worthy of regulation than behavior that merely injures oneself? The primary motive for gun control, after all, is concern about homicide, not suicide...
...antitobacco folk, aware of this bedrock belief, try to play up the harm smokers cause others. Thus the attorneys general seeking billions of dollars in damages from the tobacco companies are claiming that taxpayers have been unfairly made to pay for the treatment of smoking-related illnesses...
...affects people in their late-middle and early retirement years, is an economic boon to society. The money saved on pensions and on the truly expensive health care that comes with old age--something these smokers never achieve--surely balances, if it does not exceed, the cost of treating tobacco-related diseases...
...influence extends far beyond driving: it contributes to everything from bar fights to domestic violence. One study found that 44% of assailants in cases of marital abuse had been drinking. Another study found that 60% of wife batterers had been under the influence. Whatever claims you make against tobacco, you'd have quite a time looking for cases of the nicotine-crazed turning on their wives with a butcher knife...