This is becomming a tedious waste of time. Let me make a couple of points and then I'll quit for good.
Some social cures are like chemotherapy. While a little may help, a little more is fatal. Prohibition was meant to cure drunkeness. It didn't but it did give a wonderful boost to organized crime in the US. It's impossible to say enough about what a disaster the anti-drug movement has been. Thousands of lives broken, thousands cut short, and no end in sight, just so Eliot Ness could have a job. Raising the price on cigarettes is near the saturation point. And it doesn't achieve it's effect any more. Look at how many of the homeless smoke. If you're addicted (and it can be an addiction), you'll find something you can give up to buy cigarettes. Annamill says she just wants her sister and children to quit. Maybe she's lucky. Maybe her family is well off. Many aren't. But that's not HER problem. What she's really cheering is just another step along the road that will find her grandchildren thinking it only natural to buy their smokes from a bootlegger. And thinking the 5 - 10 year prison sentence when they're caught is only natural as well.
It's a waste of time trying to reason with Annamill, though. Linnear thinking is not her strong point. For example, she pm's me that the cigarette warning label now says smoking WILL cause cancer, not may cause cancer. Like all born again activists, she finds it easy to believe utter crap. There are MILLIONS of smokers, some of them heavy smokers, who will never have cancer. You probably know about a hundred, yourself. To use the example I know best; after 30+ years of heavy smoking, I will not die of cancer. That's positive. I WILL die of emphasyma in 5 or 10 years, but there's absolutly no sign of cancer. That may sound like a bad example but it still proves my point. I won't die of cancer. Others won't die of emphasyma, Millions of others won't die of either.
My original point is that at least half the problem is being ignored. When are the Annamills of the world going to do something?