This letter is in response to Jonathan Bracewell’s letter, “A state cigarette tax punishes addicts” (April 22).

In his letter, Bracewell cites an attempt by government to further control smoker’s lives by making their addictive habit too expensive to support. Although I agree the proposed cigarette tax does indeed achieve this very end, and I normally do not support government interference in American’s lives, I also feel the need to point out some fairly important facts.

Forcing smokers to quit does indeed seem to intrusive, until you consider that smoking has been noted as the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States and has been linked to hundreds of life-threatening diseases, most notably, lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, hypertension, high blood pressure, stress-related diseases, not to mention the hundreds of thousands killed each year from secondhand smoke. When you further consider that billions of government dollars — correction, taxpayers’ dollars — are being spent on the medical bills smokers rack up because of their poor decision-making, I wonder how much smokers are intruding on my life by making me pay for their mistakes. I would agree to leave the cigarette tax where it is at as long as we agree to stop paying smokers’ medical bills.

Bracewell also argued that many of the addicts would quit if they could. It sounds to me that the government is not the only thing controlling their decision-making, and perhaps making their habit more costly would give them the motivation they have been looking for to quit.

Mitchell Hageman

Sophomore

Mechanical Engineering