Dropped the two offspring off at their high school this morning and as I drove away there was the sight that I hate more than almost anything in the world - young kids smoking.
A whole group of them outside the school gate, some only looked around 12/13 years old, all puffing away on a ciggie before going into school - if it wasn't illegal to do so I'd love to bang their heads together and ask them if they thought those lessons on biology and "personal development" that they have in school are just a joke or perhaps a work of fiction to be studied along with Dickens and Shakespeare.
Of course, and it has to be said, many of these children will simply be copying the habit from parents and who knows, perhaps some of them have been addicted to nictoine since they ingested it in the womb ?
I can sympathise with smokers, some of my friends still smoke and promise me that they cannot give up the habit, one of them has not smoked for 20 years but swears that if he was ever given six months to live then he'd start smoking again, such was the pleasure that he got from a stick of tobacco first thing in a morning.
But there can be no excuse now for people who start smoking in the face of all the accumulated data, no-one would condone the sale of heroin in shops even if they did have a "warning, injecting heroin can damage your health" on the packet, so why can we be so blase about watching young children start on a lifetime of addiction to something that ultimately will damage their health in so many ways ?
Not that my own family is without blame - our eldest daughter went through a short phase of smoking a couple of years ago, she alwasy denied it to us saying that she was looking after the cigarettes for a friend (like we'd never heard that one before) but after a few months of of ridicule, despairing shakes of the head from me, and "I thought you knew better" type comments she dropped the habit, fortunately.
Apart from all that, I need these kids to be fit, healthy and working and paying taxes to support me and my meagre state pension in 15 years time.
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My thoughts exactly. It kills me to see young people smoking with all the information that is given to them. To me it's complete stupidity to pick up a cigarette and start smoking it. I grew up with a parent that smoked and I didn't understand it then. It made him cough, we were already hearing about the dangers...so why would I smoke?!?!? Why purposely damage my organs and possibly give myself cancer? Stupids...
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