Smoking should be illegal, its killing too many people!

First of all I feel that relating the risks of obesity to the risks of smoking is irrelevant to our debate. First of all smoking regularly can cause serious and permanent damage to a person"s health; even is a person would to quit smoking then, if they had been smoking long enough, they would still experience some minor effects of when they passed smoked. Some even still get cravings after years and years of not smoking. Whereas obesity can be tackled by losing weight, this will actually improve the health of the person and would reduce further the chance of the person having any serious health issues. Secondly smoking is an addictive habit, and although you could argue that over eating is an addictive habit in some cases it is not nearly as common and is a cytological addiction; which is a lot easier to overcome and when the habit is finally broken the chance of relapse is reduced. This is because in my opinion there are so many more benefits to losing weight then there is quitting smoking. Whereas cigarettes are addictive because of the chemical compounds of the cigarettes, this makes the habit a lot harder to break and makes the reasons for smoking very, very different form the reasons of overeating. Furthermore I feel that you should not generalise that all people who smoke will want to go against the law and "rebel" in order to get cigarettes. In2009 21% of adults smoked according to the " health and social care information centre" I feel that I am right in thinking that these people are mostly law abiding people and would prefer to quit smoking than disobey the law. I understand your argument about school children as in 2010 around a quarter of secondary school children say that they have tried smoking at least once but only 5% say they regular smokers. Surly even those 5% would be put off further by smoking being illegal. (http://www.hscic.gov.uk...) Coffee tea agreed do contain caffeine which is an addictive substance but here are the dangers of coffee (information taken from http://www.good-health.co.uk...) "High consumption over a long period of time can increase your blood pressure. "People with caffeine sensitivity and high blood pressure should avoid caffeinated drinks. "If you are pregnant you should decrease your caffeine consumption. "If you drink too much caffeine then it can make you shaky and give you a headache. "If you have too much caffeine at the end of the day then you may have trouble sleeping. I agree that coffee does have some side effect but not nearly as life changing and dangerous as cigarettes, I have my cup of coffee every morning and always feel fine. If we move away from the effects smoking has on just the people smoking and the people around the smoker and focus on the slightly wider picture you might find that the amount of people smoking is having a greater effect on the entire planet than you might think. People smoke on average 6,000,000 cigarettes a day, which is a lot of paper and a lot of trees being cut down for paper that can never be recycled. Cigarette buds litter the streets and it takes around 5 years for one cigarette bud to break down. These two facts alone will give you an idea about just how damaging cigarettes are to the environment without even calculating how many toxic gases are given off when people smoke. It is estimated that each cigarette will take around 5-8 minutes off your life, in my opinion that alone is worth thinking about. (http://www.rbhs.co.uk...)