This house would ban the smoking of cigarettes

Contention 1: Privacy and the Right to Choose. Though with me being a Conservative you'll probably never see me argue for the "Right to Choose" except in the case of economics. Here we have to see that the businesses should have the right to naturally choose who to cater to and what group of people to serve to, before you go out and go on a tangent with illegal things, let's look at the status quo. Though many places do not need the law to ban smoking in their restraunts. Those that do not chose to do so to allow those who smoke eat and smoke at the same time. We have strip bars legal in the US, but do we require everyone to go to the strip club and see what they have "on the menu. " The answer is no, we also do not do the opposite. We do not go into these bars and mandate that they cannot strip nor do we mandate that they get rid of the "entertainment" to protect the "common good. " My opponent's stance declares that we should enforce the government's banning onto many other people's moral's and habbits. I mean let's observe this again with another example. The US has an obesity epidemic, but yet do we go around and lock people's refridgerators or state when they can and cannot eat? The answer is no, so if we cannot outlaw something like fast food or strip clubs under the same argument that you are clammering for here there is no reason for criminalisation of tabacco in order to get rid of smoking. Outlawing this industry would have immidiate economic impact. The Cigarette Companies make a toatl of $346 billion per year. [1] They have a total of 1.6 million jobs and a lot of the tobacco farmers, 136,000 farmers are entirely dependent on it's legalization. [2] We can thus see that if we push for the industry to be illegal we will see a massive amount of Americans join the unemployment lines and prices of other goods will go up. The reason behind this, as I have previously shown, 136,000 farmers out there use tobacco as their cash crop, but also grow a great deal of other things. If this resolution passes we will see a rise in food prices in result of this industry closing. We can see that tabacco is only 3% of the tabacco farmer's production while it amounts to 71% of their profit. They use way over double that to produce food products while 21% is a woodlen. [3] From 1950 to 2000 we can actually have seen that the tabacco industry's employment has decreased 16% each year due to the anti-tobacco ads causing a great deal of unemployment that has already devestated the economy. [4] Now if we compare Tobacco sales to national income from 1970 we can see that as the US wages have increased by 150% as Tobacco sales have actually decreased by $2-3 billion, note that this is adjusted for inflation. [5] Note that this was from the Contention 2: Benefits of SmokingYes you heard me right, benefits. There are several benefits here that actually help people when you smoke tobacco here. In 2007, Harvard released a study showing that smoking actually reduces the risk of Parkison's Disease. Parkinson's costs the average American $25 billion per year and hurts the economy due to worker's that would normally work until their 60s go out of work 20 years eariler and not only does this hurt the individual, but the overal American economy as well. [6] Next is obseity as I spoke about in my last contention. We all know that tobacco is a hunger representant and it also makes people more disgusted by food. This was why it was so big in colonial America as it helped people survive more because of it. [7] The obeseity rates are horrific. It costs the US over $190 billion per year which is 23% of all medical spending in the US. This is something that needs to be addressed. The next one is a biggie, reduces death risk after a heart attack. We can actually see that smoker's who have heart attacks tend to have a lower risk of death than those who don't. The reason behind this is that the smoking actually helps remove plaque from the atteries. The same can be done to a non-smoker, but this has to be done with balloons which is more ineffective and can even increase the risk for death. National Institute of Health mathematician Rosalind Marimont and Robert Levy have found that smoking death studies tend to neglect other factors like poor diet and excersize and have found that the numbers are inflated by 65%. [8] There are many things that they exclude. Let's look at some other smoking facts, they found that, "Sure, these plant chemicals are measured in infinitesimal amounts. An independent study calculated 222,000 smoking cigarettes would be needed to reach unacceptable levels of benzo(a)pyrene. One million smoking cigarettes would be needed to produce unacceptable levels of toluene. To reach these estimated danger levels, the cigarettes must be smoked simultaneously and completely in a sealed 20-square-foot room with a nine-foot ceiling. Many other chemicals in tobacco smoke can also be found in normal diets. Smoking 3,000 packages of cigarettes would supply the same amount of arsenic as a nutritious 200 gram serving of sole. Half a bottle of now healthy wine can supply 32 times the amount of lead as one pack of cigarettes. The same amount of cadmium obtained from smoking eight packs of cigarettes can be enjoyed in half a pound of crab. " [8] So here we can see that smoking isn't as dangerous as expected and if you want to ban smoking then you need to go after these more dangerous things that are found in our everyday diet first. Contention 3: Tobacco-like alternativesMy opponent gives this resolution, but he fails to observe that there are "healthier" alternatives to smoking that are still tobacco like. The Sweeds use a smokeless tobacco called snus. The Sweeds have found it to not have a link between it and cancer. Not to mention that one using snus saves you $582 per year. [9] This product contains no niccotine and has seen a 20% smoking and snus usage decrease as a result. We can easily see that this is one way to eventually ween a nation off of tobacco as Pro like's and it's more economically feasiable. The next key alternative with tobacco is that of Electronic Cigarrettes, AKA E cigs/E cigarrettes. These have been shown to decrease smoking rates by 81% of users. Not to mention that this is a lot cheaper than a pack of cigarettes as a single E cigarette costs $40 while a pack of cigarettes is about $4. In 10 packs the E cig has paid for itself. Sources 1. (. http://tobaccoatlas.org...) 2. ( "The Economic Impact of the Tobacco Industry on the U. S. Economy", Price Waterhouse, 1992)3. Calculated by ERS using data from 1997 Census of Agriculture4. Johnson, Paul R. The Economics of the Tobacco Industry. New York: Praeger, 1984.5. Gale, Fred. What Tobacco Farming Means to Local Economies. U. S. Dept. Agr. , Econ. Res. Serv. AER- 694. Sept. 1994.6. (. http://www.pdf.org...) 7. (. http://www.livescience.com...) 8. (. http://www.freerepublic.com...)9. (. https://www.heartland.org...)