smoking should be illegal

I would also like to congratulate him on his first topic and would like to welcome him to Debate. org ===================================== DEFINITIONS ===================================== Smoking: An act or spell of smoking tobacco. [1] Illegal: Forbidden by law or statute. [2] ===================================== ARGUMENT ===================================== I will not even attempt to deny that there would indeed be many benefits to making smoking tobacco illegal. But, there would also be many benefits to making cars illegal. With pretty much anything, there are pros and cons. I believe that there would be more cons to illegalizing smoking. I will list a few below. 1. Freedom. There are already many people saying that it is there right to take any drugs they want. I do not know completely if this is true, but there would be an uproar of angry people who believe that smoking is there right. America was built on freedom. Every day that freedom is leaving us little by little. Allowing the government to stop people from smoking is simply a-foot-in-the-door. Do you think that the government should ban chocolate cake because it is bad for you? Do you think the government should ban spray paint because some people inhale it? 2. Taxes The government makes a good deal of money off of tobacco tax. If tobacco is illegal, they would sooner or later find another way to get that money. People would be taxed in other things such as foods, gas, and other necessities. Many people who are not smokers would be angered with having to pay these extra taxes. 3. Criminals If smoking was illegal, that would make everyone who is addicted to nicotine a potential criminal. Many people get sick if they do not have a smoke, so they would go to jail for trying to do something that was legal just a few days ago. The prisons would be filled with smokers! There would also be even more ‘drug dealers' who would simply sell tobacco illegally. In the end, there would still be smokers, just illegal ones. 4. More prison cost It would cost the government a lot more funds to house the increased number of prisoners. This would also cost the tax payers millions of more dollars, something that we do not need in today's economy. The government must provide food, health care, Clothing, and rehabilitation costs. In the state of California it cost on average $47,102 a year! Forty five million adults in America smoke. So let's say that half of these people give up the drug (which is very unlikely) and the rest go to jail for a whole year That would cost a shocking $1,036,244,000,000! There is no way that America could even start to pay this. And that is for just one year alone! 5. Mass job loss. Nearly 43,000 people were employed in some aspect of tobacco manufacturing in 1993. It would make thousands of people lose their jobs. Many of these people have families of their own that need to be taken care of. The unemployment rate in America is so high right now that we cannot simply lay off all these people. It would not be the moral or inelegant thing to do. You claim that we should give up smoking because it harms others. Did you know that we are also harmed by the smoke that cars give off? Do we go with the easy choice and ban cars? No, we try to fix it some other way, carpooling, driving less, making more pro-air cars. Same with smoking, if we had to change anything about it why not make a law that says you must smoke in a designated area only. We already have laws about smoking to protect people. You cannot smoke at schools or in hospitals, many people cannot smoke at their own jobs, and it is now illegal to air tobacco commercials on television. There are many things that we could try, but I do not completely see the need. There are plenty of other things that are harming us, and second hand smoke is at the bottom of the list. Smoke going into the air is not as bad as you are making it seem. It is most unlikely that we will pollute the planet that bad with smoke from tobacco. If we compare the Pros and Cons, we can see that it is obvious that illegalizing smoking is a bad idea. There are also other small things that would cost us money, like the court costs to ban it. That is all I have to say for now, I do request that you show me your source of how people only inhale 10% of the smoke. Thank you, and I look forward to your response. Sources: (1). . http://dictionary.reference.com... (2). . http://dictionary.reference.com... (3). . http://www.lao.ca.gov... (4). . http://org.elon.edu... (5). . http://slati.lungusa.org...