Posted on 06/02/2012 10:41:50 AM PDT by Olog-hai
It killed 695,000 people in the EU last year. But despite restaurant bans and gruesome health labels, the number of smokers is hardly going down.
A European Commission survey published for the UN's international anti-smoking day on Thursday (31 May) shows that 28 percent of the EU population smokes today compared to 29 percent in 2009.
The number is still going up in the Czech Republic, Finland and Slovenia.
Another 21 percent used to smoke but say they have given up.
The typical smoker's profile is unflattering: it is the most prevalent among young men aged 15 to 54 who left school early and who are unemployed and broke. …
Health commissioner John Dalli, from Malta (a heavy consumer), said on Wednesday he will in autumn toughen up the EU's 11-year-old Tobacco Products Directive, which governs nicotine levels and health warnings on packets.
He added that he is "deeply concerned" about cigarettes' appeal to young people.
The numbers come despite anti-smoking measures at national level and public support for tobacco austerity. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euobserver.com ...
If you smoke after sex, you should probably be using a personal lubricant.
I just spent a couple of weeks in Paris, where I saw more beautiful women than I ever have in my life. They were all slimmer than the average American woman, but nearly all of them smoked.
So the largest cash crop grown for centuries in the formerly solid democrat south is really a pet of the republican party? Really?
I theorize that there exists a shadowy arm of the law that observes them, sort of like the old Stasi or KGB. When they have failed to observe a youngster smoking for a period of time, they take her off the street and stick her in a reeducation camp, where the kid is subjected to primitive but effective techniques of behavior modification.
She'll come out puffing, like her peers.
In a way, socialist societies depend on their smokers. Not just for confiscatory tax revenues from smokers when they are still earning, but also for their early demise from various cancers or heart disease, which eases the old-age pension burden on the welfare system.
[ One half of a ≤}B^) ]
Europeans cannot shake suicidal habit (entitlement)
At least their Victory Cigarettes are still produced by a relatively free market . . .
Either way, you won't get out of life alive.
But, you know, those Euros, they are so much more sophisticated than us redneck Americans. We could learn a thing or two from them. Like smoking, walking around with flasks of gut rot liquor to drink through out the day and stopping to urinate on the sides of roads in random places. All favorite Euro pastimes.
Heh. Blasphemy. Photoshop that tobacco out at once . . .
I'm a lady, and it's taking all my strength to resist making the obvious retort. ;-)
Why the bitterness?
They have similar stereotypes about us, that start with obesity and move on from there.
Maybe, but they can’t smoke them anywhere.
I would think smoking in the modern US would rather repel than attract most young American women—and thus diminish one’s chances of indulging in consensual, non-transactional sex.
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship...
Um, exactly because they think they are superior to us and having lived among them several times I know what folly and self delusion that truly is.
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