[syhprum (OP)]

The advertising of cigarettes and smoking carried on into seventies despite the incidence of their obvious bad results on health why are their sales still permitted.   

[evan_au]

1. Nicotine is addictive
2. The cigarette industry worked very hard to persuade people that cigarettes are fashionable and desirable - all the movie stars and sports stars use them
3. They were vigorously advertised to get people to take them up at th youngest possible age
4. The cigarette industry suppressed any scientific evidence that they found for adverse health effects, while putting a spin on things like "cigarettes make you slim" (ie anoxia is killing you)
5. The cigarette industry lobbied the government very hard: Think of all the jobs that will be lost if you limit cigarette consumption!

Australia started by blocking advertising on mass media
- Then by putting increasingly stern warnings on the packages
- Now there are sickening photos of gangrene and diseased lungs on every packet
- Education in schools and directed at the general public
- Making it illegal to smoke in the workplace, in restaurants, train stations or anywhere else that people congregate
- And enforcing a uniform drab green on the packaging
- Hiding them away in a closed cupboard
- Effectively making smokers into pariahs...

But they know that making an existing legal addictive substance become illegal overnight does not work - it just brings in the criminal underworld, such as happened during Prohibition in the USA.
So a steady tightening of the regulations is about the only practical way to do it.

[alancalverd]

The UK government raises £12,000,000,000 annually from tobacco tax. That is more than 30% of the defence budget. Smokers do not live as long as nonsmokers so represent a net saving to the national pensions budget, and to private annuity providers. It is therefore not in the government's interest to ban the practice, but just to keep consumption at a consistent and predictable level by gradually increasing the tax level whilst making virtuous gestures on advertising and packaging.

[syhprum (OP)]

There are to many of us and we live to long !,how about free cigarettes for old folk.

[evan_au]

Smokers do not live as long as nonsmokers so represent a net saving to the national pensions budget

I don't know how the UK health budget compares to the defence budget, but...
- Smokers have increased cost of health care
- Smokers are medically unfit to work at a younger age, so contribute less to taxation revenue

So the economic question becomes "Is a short but sicker life cheaper than a longer but healthier life?".
I'm afraid that I'm not an economist.

In countries like the USA which don't have universal health care, it probably is cheaper to "just let them die", provided they do it after their employer-funded health care has terminated.

[Petrochemicals]

Probably the fact that the working classes are subject to much more harmful toxins in there daily lives, smoking was and to a lesser degree now negligable


Things that cause terrible health effects now reccomended to use breathing apperatus

Lime - plasterers,
Paint spray - painters,
Coal -miners,

Things that are still not widely protected against

Hairspray and cosmetics - hair stylists beauty parlours etc
Exausts - pretty much everyone, some more than others
Farming chemicals farmers

Asbestos has been banned, fumes from chemical reactions like electro plating etc and all manner of industrial pollutants are negated, but lots still exist. They where still painting clocks radioactive not long ago and going a bit further back, steel puddlers, teeth fell out and lived till 30 because of the steel fumes