Quote:
Originally Posted by The Flying Mouse
 Coming back to the NHS issue Claire, go to any A&E on a Saturday night, and you'll see more NHS pounds being literally bled all over the floor as a result of drunken fights, people hit by drink drivers, and drunken antics gone wrong than anything a smokers recovery time can do to a budget. |
Fair point, as it happens I don't agree with money being spent by the NHS on idiots who don't know when to stop drinking either, but I don't think a quarter of the population are in A&E on a Saturday night, and that's the proportion of smokers in the UK. If you want to make that comparison, the drunken idiots who injure others through their actions are generally prosecuted, and there are more people at risk from passive smoking than getting lamped by someone down the pub.
And as for the cost, I come back to my earlier point, how many of those people injured by the drunken idiots are smokers, and have the excessive cost of recovery compared to the non-smokers? Do we put that down to the drunken idiot who injured them in the first place, or to the fact that they're smokers?
I still believe that we should all have a choice, but it does seem to me that until the ban came in, we non-smokers didn't really have one. I'm sorry for those people whose livelihoods are being affected, but that may also be down to the credit crunch as much as the smoking ban, there's less disposable income around, so people can't afford to go out as much as they used to.