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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Community Comment

Lightem if you’ve gottem…

AP (The Spokesman-Review)
AP (The Spokesman-Review)

Good morning, Netizens...


This afternoon I am going to take a road seldom-traveled and RANT.


It's bad enough that our state and federal governments are taxing cigarettes to the point where an ordinary citizen in strictest obedience to the laws of the land can no longer afford to buy themselves a pack of smokes and dispassionately light up, thus feeding their habit and destroying their health. You can cheat the system by buying cigarettes online, thus screwing the respective governments out of their ill-gotten gains, yes, but that, too, is breaking the laws of the land.


But now they tell us we cannot smoke in our city parks. Pah!


You can still get rolled, beaten, jumped, jacked around and molested nearly with impunity, because there are no armed patrols under normal circumstances poking the bushes and byways in our parks looking for miscreants. But God forbid, you light up a cigarette while you are innocently sitting alongside the river with your fishing pole and a line in the water, and you can now get a ticket if a cop happens to wander through.


If we cannot or will not take care of our health by not smoking cigarettes, the government will tax them out of existence and then criminally punish anyone who lights up. Talk about government regulation! Eventually the government will legislate cigarettes to where we will have to quit, like it or not, either because we cannot afford them or because we will not be able to smoke'm if we have'm.


Hogwash! Or is it?


Dave



Spokesman-Review readers blog about news and issues in Spokane written by Dave Laird.