As a lifelong contributor to the coffers of our illustrious tobacco industry, you can imagine my dismay upon hearing the news yesterday that cigarettes are going up (again) by 30c. Having said that, it could have been an awful lot worse. Yet again, the government pussied out of the big hike, and yet again the anti-tobacco campaigners were whinging that the latest rise only reflects inflation and that the government should have hit us with a wallet-busting €2 per pack increase. Yikes.

Professor Luke Clancy, and his buddies at ASH, say that the cost of cigarettes plays a huge part in deterring kids from smoking. I say that’s a big load of bollocks. I can remember back when I started smoking the price of a 10 box was around 90p. Now 90p might not sound like a lot of money to you, but in 1989 the only kids that had any money were the ones that just made their communion. And let’s face it, your communion wasn’t exactly the rollover lottery jackpot that today’s kids enjoy. You were probably lucky to get £50. And you were even luckier if your parents didn’t drink that £50 when you were tucked up in bed that night. Thieves. And yet, somehow, we all managed to scrape enough cash together to buy 10 Rothmans (kids were hardcore in the 80’s) every couple of days and so begin our careers in smoking.

That 90p to us back then would be the equivalent of €20 to the flush little fuckers we have now, and so, I think Luke Clancy should give up the game on this one. Either that, or campaign for such an enormous increase that your local Spar will have to start offering finance packages on a box of 20 Benson.

Everyone knows the real reason kids take up smoking. It’s the same reason I started smoking and the reason my parents started smoking and their parents before them. Smoking fucking rocks. You can take a four-eyed, snot-nosed, google t-shirt wearing nerd and stick a cigarette in his mouth and he becomes instantly cooler. It’s like magic. And the reason we all have this amazing image of the cool-as-shit smoker is because every single action hero smokes. Fucking Fact. I defy any man under the age of 40 to tell me that he hasn’t, at some point in his life, stuck a fat cigar in his mouth and uttered the immortal words ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. You say you haven’t? You’re a goddamn liar.

If it wasn’t for Bogart, Brando, James Dean, Schwarzenegger, Willis and even that awful sack Mel Gibson then maybe, just maybe, smoking wouldn’t be so cool. Unless someone comes up with some sort of mind-erasing technology, and wipes my memory of these movie legends sparking up a smoke after a particularly impressive killing spree, then I’m sad to say that I think I’ll be smoking till the day I die…

So stop putting up the price, assholes. It’s not working, it’s just pissing us smokers off.

H

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Money, Vent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.