I wrote that song for laughs, daylia, back some considerable time before society started putting health warnings on cigarette packages and passing laws restricting smoking in public places (not that I didn't have a real point in it, though). I haven't bothered writing any more anti-smoking songs since the government started passing restrictive legislation or since it became fashionable in the mainstream to attack smoking. I only tend to write stuff like that when I'm still more or less a voice in the wilderness. I don't need to write it anymore now. No point belabouring something that's obvious to most people already.

You don't seem to be getting my humour on this particular issue.

I have smoked...in Native ceremonies. (And grass on a handful of occasions.) Like I said in an earlier post, I could see right away what was pleasant about it. It's not pleasant to breathe someone else's secondhand smoke, but it is definitey pleasant to smoke oneself...once past childhood and the exquisitely fine senses of a young body (you said yourself that when you first clandestinely tried cigarettes as a youngster they tended to make you feel sick).

Children's bodies are rather wiser in some respects than older bodies. A child knows right away that the smoke doesn't taste or feel good...but with an adult it's different. A child knows right away that beer doesn't taste good, but an adult relates differently to that too. (usually)

No animal would willingly inhale smoke, but a human would. That's because humans are programmed by culture and it overrides their most natural impulses with artificially acquired thinking.

If we lived in a society where it was taken for granted that the little finger of the left hand MUST be surgically removed in youth (like tonsils, foreskins, or wisdom teeth for example)...then you... and I suspect pretty well everyone else (including probably me) would have had it done without a second thought...and we would look askance at people who had not had it done!!!

That's how programmed we are.

You smoke because you saw others doing it when you were young. And now you like it. Perfectly understandable. That's why I shave. (I don't need to, but I'm used to the idea.) And it's also why we customarily cover certain parts of the body when in public...but men's nipples are not seen as obligatory to cover in public...except when in a restaurant, business meeting, movie theater, or another somewhat more formal situation, perhaps! Women's bare nipples, on the other hand, are a totally contraband item, except in certain carefully prescribed circumstances (strip clubs, certain magazines, certain movies, and in private, of course).

It's custom! Programmed behaviour. And it's totally arbitrary, in most cases. It has nothing to do with good or evil. No one was ever yet attacked or injured by a bare nipple! But people have been attacked and prosecuted for violating the custom.

Doesn't any of that strike you as just a bit amusing...from a certain point of detachment?

I shall remember, Greg, to avoid standing on the street in Oxford...if at all possible. :-)

To ban cars from downtown areas and replace them with excellent public transportation of a non-polluting nature would be a superb idea! Another superb idea would be to ban the burning of fossil fuels by internal combustion engines beyond a specified date (like 5 years from now) and to replace them all with non-polluting power in as short a time as humanly possible. It could be done.

It just so happens that there is a corporate oligarchy ruling us that doesn't want that done. They have money to make by burning gasoline...just like the tobacco companies have money to make by selling cigarettes. Money calls the shots under the present system and funds and controls the politicians. What do you suggest, Greg?