Cigarettes are evil. The person smoking the cigarette may not be evil but the pain and suffering that cigarettes cause is. I watched a father-in-law, a neighbor, an aunt and my father die from the ravages from tobacco. The last few years of my father’s life, he wore a breathing mask attached to a tank of oxygen. His freedom was limited to the fifty-foot hose connected to that tank.
Smoking Kills
Margie Mason (Associated Press) wrote about smoking and listed some frightening statistics.
- Thirty percent of the world’s smokers are in China.
- In the next 15 years, an estimated 2 million will die from it.
- The largest tobacco grower in the world is in China.
- Heart disease, linked to smoking, is already killing a million a year.
- China has more cases of diabetes than any country.
Dr. Judith Mackay said, “You have to price them (cigarettes) out of the hands and pockets and the mouths of children.”
Hong Kong may be showing the rest of the mainland how to cut back on tobacco use by putting high taxes on cigarettes as we have done in America. The Chinese government may be watching and hoping that this cycle of doom can be slowed.
Learn more from Smoking Gun
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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