I HAVE just read your comments on the letter that protested against smoking in public (May 6).

I find your opinions wilfully blind to the facts. The really bad news about smoking is (1) it stinks, (2) it harms not only those who use tobacco but also the innocent, (3) it is addictive. The reason why smokers are paying 84 per cent in excise duty is because of this same addictiveness. If it were truly a matter of choice, as smokers are constantly claiming, it would have nothing like the same hold on people to the extent that almost one in three of us are smokers, and the basic retail price would have to be much higher.

If you had seen the wretched state of the tobacco victims that I saw when in hospital last autumn, the men and women dragging themselves out of the wards to smoke outside and the wretched spectacle they presented as they coughed and spat, I don't think you would continue long in complacency. Smoking is a gross pollution of the social environment. And smokers are scarcely ever prepared to admit that they actually smell, and make smell everything about them. Contrary to currently fashionable myths among the young it is not a mark of independence and maturity but of dependence and enslavement to peer pressure.

John Auty

Custom House Lane

Fleetwood

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