I hate cigarettes, hate cigarette smoke, and wish no one smoked them...

[alcibiades_mystery]

12. I'm the last person to argue *for prohibition* of anything

But I should make one point before the Rah Rah Rah really kicks in on this thread:

Posing the questions as personal moral questions rather than deeply social pragmatic questions is itself question-begging. There are perfectly good questions to ask about "prohibitions" that have to do with social cost rather than morality. And social groups do have the obligation to consider social costs. Now, they might ignore them, or determine that individual freedom should trump social costs, but to argue that civics shouldn't also be about determining social costs is the height of the very extremist individualism that has gotten us into quite the mess in the last thirty years. I don't have to care AT ALL about the morality of smoking if it can be definitively demonstrated that smoking increases the social cost of medicine for everybody in a society. It's not a moral issue of the individual, but a pragmatic concern for the social group.