I smoked irregularly (probably one cigarette every month or so) when I was a teenager. Never bought them...I always bummed them off classmates or stole them from my cousin (who smoked), etc. [Linked Image]

If I ever felt like smoking I wanted it to be something recreational, relaxing and contemplative (you know the stereotypicial "sitting at a cafe on the Seine with a Gaulois clenched between my teeth while pondering the state of the world" type thing).

However all the people I see smoking are always huddled in doorways in the cold puffing frantically away before having to run back upstairs to their offices.

And it's usually cheap cigarettes that STINK (almost everyone here in New York smokes)! That turned me away from it. Plus it made my hands freezing cold.

It turns into an addiction. You can't control it. I don't like things I can't control.

If I wanted to smoke, it was when I mentally felt like it, not when my body craved the nicotine.

Plus...I'm a skinflint. Cigarettes are expensive here ($7.50 a pack for the cheap ones because of all the taxes)....got better
things to spend that kind of money on. [Linked Image]

Now the mayor has prohibited smoking in bars and discos. What the hell??? Since when do you go to a tavern to eat health-food? You go to a tavern to get drunk. Period. It's not a place for health nuts. [Linked Image]

If you really want something bad for your lungs...stand next to one of our countless gasoline & diesel-powered buses, trucks, cars or ferry boats belching out black smoke from their exhaust pipes. That'll kill you in an instant!!!