Smoking and its Advertising

Today I read an article from USAToday.com about the new packaging that the FDA will be putting together for cigarette packages, to more harshly depict the negative effects of smoking, including images of cancer, etc.

I think that this is a great idea. Smoking not only kills, but is of course disgusting, smelly, icky, and tastes horrible. Kissing a smoker is entirely unpleasant, and I'm glad that the number of smokers is going down. Everyone knows it's bad for you, and yet addiction has claimed so many.

However, what annoys me is the continued sale of cigarettes despite all we know about their damaging properties.
I remember in one of my health classes, seeing a picture of a healthy, normal lung, and then right next to it an image of a diseased lung, an exercise much like Page 26 of the examples of the Product Warning Labels that the FDA is putting together.

I remember looking at that image, and being disgusted that someone could do that to their body, and simply thinking how wrong it was, how completely unhealthy and destructive it looked, just to have black insides instead of pink. It seemed devilish to me then, almost as if smoking was letting evil reside inside your body. Even now, whenever someone asks me about smoking, or even when a friend smokes around me and I politely ask them to move away or blow the smoke elsewhere, I remind them that I like my lungs pink.

Right around that time, still thinking about this lesson, I remember with almost crystal memory resolution the conversation we had in the car that day, searching for a spot in the tight rush-hour frenzied lot. It must have been winter, because it was cold and the memory has dankness scratched on the surface:
"Mom, if smoking is so bad, why can you still do it? Why don't they make people stop doing it?"
"Because tobacco production is a big part of the economy, and if they made it illegal, the whole economy could break down."

I always remember that as my first realization of the dark horrible mess that the world was, my first foray into adult conceptualization, where those days of "it's bad so you can't do it" are gone, and childhood remains a memory. Even though everyone knows that smoking a cigarette will eventually kill you, it's still legal just because of the tobacco industry is such an intrinsic part of our economy, we simply cannot allow it to be illegal, and completely destroy a large foundation of our financial structure.
We can let it kill people, one addicted puff at a time, but we can't allow it to kill the economy.

Now that I'm an adult, of course, I understand that an economic change as large as making tobacco sales illegal would cause people to lose jobs and suffer in that way, and that slowing down tobacco use using the tactics outlined in the USA Today article is a better way to slowly change the economic dependence on tobacco.

But sometimes I just wish that it could be like when I was in Middle School again: if you know it's bad, you just don't let people do it, end of story. Weren't those 10 minutes of believing that lovely?