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With the revenue involved I,cannot see how they will ever ban cigarettes:-
http://www.the-tma.org.uk/tobacco-tax-revenue.aspx
Regards – Matron
The amount of money smokers and drinkers cost the NHS I think they should pay more than others.
It is easy for us to blame the Government for things like smoking. It is primarily society’s problem.
To my mind there should be a far greater social stigma attached to parents smoking, and for that matter drinking heavily, than there is. It is like a parent with a gun loaded with bullets that if hit, act over years. Close his / her eyes, and shoot in the same room as their children. He /she’d be put in jail. Children will breathe in that smoke and copy their parents. Packets should say "Parents can kill their children by smoking".
Of course they should be given all the help possible to stop. But those parents who smoke are idiots, with no self control.
I think every child found to be smoking should be taken, with it’s parents to a hospital and shown a person having a painful death. With the sufferers consent, I am sure there would be a lot of willing cancer patients out there.
Mark
Value Is EverythingCan’t really do a great deal to help someone who is drowning in their own blood; can’t really put a picture of it on a packet of cigarettes either. The NHS does everything it can to help people give up smoking, but fear of what it can do to your health doesn’t seem to stop people smoking..I spent most of my life smoking and giving up; when I was smoking I didn’t worry what I had done to my health…when I packed up I would then start to worry..this worry would go away when I started again. I doubt if people will be smoking at all in 20 years time; if you look at programmes like Life on Mars you realize that not so long ago we all lived in a haze of fumes, at home and in the workplace. If it was banned completely people would complain about personal freedom. What I don’t understand is tobacco companies being allowed to target third world countries with their product.
When I was about 14 it was the era when they finally admitted that smoking was not actually as cool as had been made out to be and there was finally an acceptance, or perhaps more accurately a public recognition, of the dangers of smoking.
Living in a family where my parents and grandparents all smoked the odds were I would be a smoker as well.
Then one night there was a report in the This Week program (ITV’s answer to Panorama) on the physical effects of smoking. They showed a film of lung of someone who died of a smoking related illness. The pathologist actually opened up the lung and this horrible sticky tar flowed out.
At the time it was a very dramatic and controversial piece of television.
It certainly worked for me and at that point I vowed I would never smoke a cigarette in my life and I never have.
It also had a profound effect on my parents and grandmother. Both my Mother and Grandmother stopped smoking immediately and neither ever touched another cigarette again. My Father found it harder to stop – he managed to cut down but did not stop completely until he had a heart attack some ten years later.
Certainly that graphic imagery worked for me, whether it would work with today’s teenagers I don’t know.
Funnily enough, this was the topic of BBC doctors-and-nurses drama "Holby City" last night.
An ambitious surgeon was trying to push through a policy of not operating in patients who have abnegated their responsibilities to their own health.
The obese, the smoker, the heavy drinker. If you brought all three to Holby General, you were in big trouble. I’d have been bolloxed had I lived in that fictional borough, well in need of BUPA.
I smoked from eighteen to forty two. Compulsively.I would have a cigarette while I was having a cigarette. Employers would amend my contract for my continual smoke breaks. I was the type of smoker who would stop half way through a good bonk to have a cigarette – a mid-coitus fag. I smoked during meals in Indian restaurants. I was that man who ruined your anniversary dinner by blowing clouds of acrid smoke in your face from the next table along.
On one of the "pub-bookie" high octane gambling days I often describe in the top room (pubs, racetrack, pubs, bookies, dogs, casino etc), I would regularly do a hundred fags. No problems at all.
When I did the betting full time on the PC, I would regularly do sixty B & H. I probably enjoyed the first – most of them I didn’t even notice until it came to the end of Stateside, when it was time to empty my ashtrays and open the window to clear the Whitechapel fog.
I must have spent fifty to sixty grand on fags over those years. What a criminal, criminal waste of money that was.
Yet, Moe, Mark, a picture of my lungs blackened and suppurating, my teeth rotting, my skin drying, my wallet emptying, my yellowed tongue, the sound of my hacking morning cough, the sight of the hastily evacuated bile, or being reminded of the stench on my clothes as I went for dinner at my non smoking parents, none of them would have stopped me smoking.
None of the above would. Nor would the threat of my health remaining untreated on the NHS.
Moral high horses have never stopped a single smoker from quitting a single cigarette.
When measuring relapse rates, cigarettes are SIX times more addictive than taking heroin. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man.
I gave up two years ago and I have not gone a minute without thinking about cigarettes. Not a minute. Yet I’ve still not had one.
My point is that you want to give up when you want to give up. Not a minute more, not a minute less. Its a decision you make unilaterally. The NHS should reduce the amount they spend on this advertising and convert it to medical care, imo.
Any chance you can put up a picture of your pulpit as well, Mark??
I am a humanist! lol.
I do not have any problem with anyone smoking Grass. Everyone has the right to smoke if they want to, I do not want smoking banned.
It is just parents who cause harm to their children by smoking I have a problem with. Whether that is by kids inhaling the smoke or by copying their parents. Just don’t see any way the health of someones child would not come before any addiction.
However grim this might sound, I do wonder whether it is a good idea to find cures for things like smoking related cancer and type 2 diabetis etc.
Everyone who wanted to could smoke or eat however much / whatever they wanted to. Then go to the NHS and say I want the cure. It would be impossible to pay for. There’d also be too many old people and not enough young.
I applaud your decision to quit Maxilon, and do realise it is hard. But this campaign is about preventing cancer, which is surely better than having to treat the end result.
Mark
Value Is EverythingMax; it’s a relief to know that I’m not the only person who used to start thinking of the next cigarette while they were smoking the first and spent the whole meal looking forward to the smoke at the end…every afternoon I used to do a Paul McKenna stop smoking cd, wake up and have a fag..I am so ashamed of the people that I blew smoke over in restaurants…so, if any of them are reading this sorry! What really stopped me was the birth of my grandson.
Surely Mark meant ‘smokers should automatically be put at the top of NHS lists due to the Extra tax they pay’ after all, without the revenue from smokers the NHS wouldn’t be worth using.
Smokers will stop when they want to as Max said and at least smokers recognise that their choice is not without risk but it’s the overweight who cost the NHS more than smokers and drinkers combined and for contributing less too.
It’s about time people started looking through the smoke and focussing on the tubbies who are silently munching and slothing their way to the destruction of the NHS, while hiding behind the stand-up smokers.
Did someone bring this thread up or is it a repeat?
Sorry, Simon, if it’s a repeat thread though I’m surprised no-one has continued the line about their experience of pain-relief in the NHS.
However, I think perhaps Maxillon has inadvertently pointed to a possible reason why the NHS should be promoting compulsive smoking:-
Max wrote: "I was the type of smoker who would stop half way through a good bonk to have a cigarette – a mid-coitus fag."
Imagine the savings to be had by saving on contaceptive health education and reducing unwanted pregnancies.Although both parents smoked at various points during my youth I never got in to smoking. I did try a few but was never too enamoured with the taste and also had a complete inability to do it right. I never got the hang of taking a drag and the only danger to my lungs was the real possibilty of me coughing one up after inhaling the bloody things.
Oh Moe. My ex missus still describes cigarettes as the
real
love of my life. I used to think about smoking non stop. Each significant event of my life; leaving school, passing exams, great football sporting successes, women, jobs, windfalls, gambling wins, Derbys Nationals, Stewards Cups, births, marriages, christenings and deaths were inexorably accompanied by the promise of another cigarette. And you’re right – what’s the point eating when you can skip food altogether and
have a cigarette where the main course should be!
I love em, but as you point out, kids change you. Two things happened to me.
One day in December 2006, I settled down to bet for the day on various AW and US races and also to do some writing. I started at midday and finished about midnight. Without being consciously aware of it, I’d accompanied the session with over sixty Benson and Hedges. Sadly for fifteen quids worth of entertainment, I cannot remember smoking more than a few. Add a few hundred quids worth of unlucky equine losses and that was one monster of an expensive day. It made me think.
Secondly, as you allude to, my lad was doing his PSHE lessons and came to visit me the Saturday after. As we were driving to my flat, he asked me to stop smoking because he mentioned that he’d quite like a dad when he was a bit older.
That Saturday evening, I smoked twenty cigarettes while I watched a double bill of Wolverhampton and
"The Shining"
. I smoked one after the other and enjoyed every single tingling length. I used a zippo to maximise the pleasure.
The next morning I went straight to the supermarket and brought a hundred 4mg nicotine chewing gums. And that was that.
Mark, all that post and I never mentioned the Big C. Thanks for reminding me. Strangely, that was never a concern: (I suppose that’s being a punter).
And Si, I was always a certain weight. Now I’m that certain weight plus 15 kilos with no sign of the "oh, you’ll lose it eventually ducky" phenomenon so beloved of the NHS advice panjandrums.
So I guess they won’t be treating me after all!
While I’m on a roll and if anyone is interested in quitting, nicotine chewing gums were THE best method ever.
I tried cold turkey (no good), patches (made me hallucinate and allow no control to conquer the really bad cravings) and lollipops (it worked for Telly Savalas but not for me).
Chewing gums pump your body full of nicotine and allow you to "unlearn" the behavioural patterns/habits first. Ignore the hard core who think there is a badge for quitting cold turkey. Have as many gums as you want for a period of six months. It’s the patterns which break your resolve.
The first fag in the morning, after breakfast, in the car, tea breaks etc etc. Then after a set period of time, you can cold turkey the nicotine in a week off work/betting.
The gums allow you a measure of control, (for instance, I had three chewing gums after Day by Day was done on the line at 50 by a Channon/Bowman animal. If I was on patches, there was no way I could have NOT had a cigarette, such was the impact of the resulting angst). Patches wouldn’t have supplied the nicotine I needed.
And really, you only give up ONE cigarette, in the final analysis. The first of the day. How hard is it to give up one cigarette?
None of this is publicised by New Leaf or the NHS (at least round my way).
I weigh quite a bit more than when I smoked; however when I started chewing gum I dislocated my jaw and ended up not being able to eat proper food for months! I started smoking because I get very nervous if and when I socialize and I just wanted something to hide behind…when smoking started to become socially unacceptable I found that by being part of ‘the smokers’ I belonged in their group…then, when my marriage broke up I started to buy a packet of cigarettes each evening, so they became my ‘friends’..It was still @ 2 years before I admitted to myself that I was a ‘smoker’ and not an ‘occasional social smoker’. The whole smoking thing is quite bizarre; it’s almost like a form of conditioning, a sort of Pavlovs’ dogs thing…..coffee=ciggie; pub
=ciggies;Grand National day=loads of ciggies etc….
I tried to smoke Grass once. But he ran away before I could set light to his flared trousers.
Regrding the NHS. I have to say that my son was diagnosed type 1 diabetic on Friday, and he has had the best possible treatment and service I could ever wish for.
Appart from the Polish nurse who scared the living shet out of him about "his disease"!I tried to smoke Grass once. But he ran away before I could set light to his flared trousers.
While I’m on a roll and if anyone is interested in quitting, nicotine chewing gums were THE best method ever.
I tried cold turkey (no good), patches (made me hallucinate and allow no control to conquer the really bad cravings) and lollipops
Can’t comment on gum, patches, lollipops (really?) or cold-turkey having never tried – or wanted to try – them but I find nasal snuff is an excellent alternative to lighting-up in this smoke-free brave new world: cheap (not taxed), fragrant, harmless and packs a ‘clean’ punch of milady nicotine.
An agreeably old-world, refined and slightly decadent custom, so long as you are not averse to brown snot and a disgusting handkerchief.
Always disliked cigarettes, other than the dark leaf (Old Holborn-type) roll-up, which is essentially just a fine-cut version of that sublime product: pipe tobacco.
smoke when you can, snuff when you can’t
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