I am a little amused by the heroic efforts of city councils and some states to stop people from smoking. I know that cigarettes are the only legal product which, used as directed, will kill you. I’m not defending it. But as these agents for good rush to take the coffin nails out of the fingers of adults who have smoked for years, they overlook a couple of very important things.

1. It is not easy to quit. I know. I once quit for a year and, in a moment of weakness, was enslaved all over again. The cigarette companies manufacture that addiction into their product.

2. Millions of Americans have quit smoking as I finally did about 35 years ago. The days when, at a party in someone’s home, there was a foot and a half of smoke hanging from the ceiling. You just can’t find it anymore. Without benefit of high-minded, anti-smoking busybodies; America – voluntarily – quit smoking to an astonishing degree. What today’s guardians of public health are doing now is merely coming down out of the hills, after the battle, and shooting the wounded.

3. What could they be doing instead? Well, I wonder how many people over 20 start smoking. Not many. Most people start smoking in high school or before. A lot before. That’s where you could really end smoking. That’s how you would, in a generation, have a smoke free country. Just figure out how to keep children from starting to smoke.

That’s a hard one. Who understands the adolescent mind? But if we put as much effort into learning how to do that and putting a program into action as we do hounding the poor folks who are addicted, most of whom will pay dearly for their habit – we just might find a breakthrough.

What if every jurisdiction took all the money it spends enforcing their anti-smoking laws aimed at the hopelessly hooked cigarette addicts and created a fund to research how to keep children and teenagers from starting to smoke. That would really be doing something to stop the habit from ever forming. It would be effective and something they could actually be proud of.