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By your logic teens are informed and fully responsible for all critical decisions.

You are therefore, no doubt, in favor of lowering age of consent, drinking, driving and voting to age 17 or lower.

You also present only anecdotal evidence to back your assertion, which is just as irrelevant as whether steak or chicken is preferable. You make it sound like the 18 year old smoker first tries a cigarette around 15 or 16, when data shows experimentation with smoking starts around age 10 and averages age 12. Source at bottom of post.

You also raise an interesting point about alcohol. Tobacco use is more likely to start in families where alcohol is abused, which suggests further diminishment of a youth’s judgement is a factor. This reinforces my assertion that smoking typically starts before the age where responsible decision making occurs. Thanks!

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/8727241/

The main fact that I assert is that pre-rolled, pre-packaged cigarettes are easily available to minors, which leads to a significant number becoming addicted before they are mature enough to understand the long term consequences..

Below is a list of sources from which I draw this conclusion. You are perfectly free to think that it’s OK to expose immature youths to mass produced hazardous products. I will respectfully disagree.

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0127.pdf

By your logic teens are informed and fully responsible for all critical decisions.

No. By my logic, teens are not "children". I never said that they were either informed, nor responsible. Just that many, if not most, are going to be highly experimentative, and aren't looking to adults as either role models, or facilitators.

You are therefore, no doubt, in favor of lowering age of consent, drinking, driving and voting to age 17 or lower.

What a ridiculous leap of logic. Once again, I am in no way saying that they are making good decisions at that age. Just that they are no longer "children", and the decisions that they make are going to have little to do with a) "role models", b) adult facilitators, c) all of the assorted boogeymen created over the years of hysterical "for-the-children" fascism (from Joe Camel, to magazine advertising, to the convenience of cigarette "packaging", to flavors). If somehow you take that, and infer that somehow a lower age of drinking is the implication, then I admire your ability to take logical leaps of such great distance, and in such random directions.

You also present only anecdotal evidence to back your assertion, which is just as irrelevant as whether steak or chicken is preferable.

You stated that people were fine before they had ever heard of tobacco, as though this was some brilliant retort. I was merely pointing out that this had no possible relevance to the issue. Once again, smoking may be enjoyed by many, but it is not necessary for life itself. You obviously didn't grasp the point about chicken and steak. It was an "analogy".

You make it sound like the 18 year old smoker first tries a cigarette around 15 or 16, when data shows experimentation with smoking starts around age 10 and averages age 12. Source at bottom of post.

These types of things can be highly misleading. I certainly knew many people who experimented with cigarettes in that pre-teen stage (having been one of them, I saw it first hand on a number of occasions). A very small few started smoking frequently, but for most, experimentation was highly sporadic, and didn't amount to much. The majority of people started smoking in a more regular fashion in their mid-teens (14-17).

Once again. Perspective. Of all of the things we did in those late pre-teen years, and early teen years, smoking the occasional cigarette was probably one of the least dangerous things done. We also sledded through the woods, on ice, on very steep hills. We wrestled each other high up in tree houses. We caught the occasional poisonous snake. In other words, we were kids (not children anymore, but not yet adults). And we did a lot of very stupid things, many of which should have killed us, or maimed us, or crippled us for life, and had we been so unfortunate, we would have had only ourselves to blame (even at that age, the decisions were ours), and we would have never had the opportunity to reverse the effects of those decisions.

As I said, perspective. Of all of the decisions we made (some quite intelligent, some touchingly charitable, and others unbelievably stupid), smoking the occasional cigarette while we were kids, while not necessarily smart, was also not particularly dangerous. Between that early experimentation, and the debilitation and death sometimes caused by smoking, lay years and decades where we could stop (unlike the kid I knew who nearly broke his neck jumping off the roof of his house, and caused permanent nerve damage). We could make those decisions well before smoking caused any serious problems, and certainly had decades to reverse course before death kicked in.

Once again, perspective.

You also raise an interesting point about alcohol. Tobacco use is more likely to start in families where alcohol is abused, which suggests further diminishment of a youth’s judgement is a factor. This reinforces my assertion that smoking typically starts before the age where responsible decision making occurs. Thanks!

I never said anything about the families of these children. I am not sure why you would think I did. But more to the point, I don't disagree that smoking typically starts "before the age where responsible decision making occurs" (although I would never declare myself the arbiter of what that age is, since I have seen many kids who are quite responsible, and many adult who are the exact opposite). My point is that these decisions are occurring well past the point of "role models", the convenience of "packaged cigarettes", or any of the long list of villains manufactured over the years in order to have someone to target (the generally mythical peer-pressurer, Joe Camel, ads, movie starts who smoke, other role models, people in the park smoking a cigarette, flavored cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, candy cigarettes, etc.).

One other point, also made by another poster. Yes peer pressure did occur in those very early years. But this was also a time when kids are constantly daring each other to do stupid things. This is a very different period of time than the later teen-age years, where the hardcore habits begin. It is in that later period, that I personally witnessed that strong anti-peer-pressure was the rule, and peer-pressure the rare exception. Sorry I wasn't clearer on that earlier.

You are perfectly free to think that it’s OK to expose immature youths to mass produced hazardous products. I will respectfully disagree.

Ah, and here were come to the crux of the issue, and the only reason I am bothering to respond. So you say that I am saying that "it’s OK to expose immature youths to mass produced hazardous products. ". To begin with, could you be any more manipulative with your choice of wording? Let's see:

"mass-produced" -- usually evil in the liberal's mind, but not exactly a necessary component of your point, so clearly added for emotional value alone. But important, since it establishes both villain (the mass-producer), and motive (profit, since there is generally no other reason to produce in mass).

"hazardous" -- bleach, is hazardous; gasoline, is hazardous; rat poison, is hazardous. Cigarettes, if they do cause disease/death, do so after a very long time (decades, versus seconds) of constant use (dozens of times daily, as opposed to, well, once). Interesting to use such a loaded word. What you have done is put "mass production", or "exposure", or anything else done by the villains, on the same moral plane as putting rat poison into their sippy cup.

"expose immature youths" -- a good phrase here, but I would point out that youths of all kinds, both immature, and their mature brethren, would be exposed.

And now we get to your main point in this revealing last statement. You have already established your primary villain, the mass-producer, but no liberal feels safe unless they can have at least two villains. The evil corporation(s), plus an evil person, is the preferred combination. So, what do you do, you manufacture out of thin air, based on nothing more than your imagination, the accusation that I feel it OK to so expose our precious, yet immature, youth, to the pre-packaged version of cyanide. To reiterate, my point is that kids, teens, and young adults, are going to be exposed to a lot of very dangerous and very corrupting things, whether you or I say it is OK, or not. Trying to put kids into bubbles does more harm than good, and in no way diminishes the exposure, over the long run. Put cigarettes into proper perspective, given the wide away of far (far, far) more hazardous products and activities they are exposed to, not to mention the far (far, far) more corrupting things they are exposed to. There is no need to constantly be looking for villains, yet that is what liberals are insistent on doing.

Kids will be kids, teens will be teens. But restricting the freedom of adults, so that the anti-smoking crusader can feel better about themselves, in their counter-productive attempts to change the nature of those between childhood, and adulthood. That, is simply not acceptable. Destruction of the concepts of private property, in this crusade -- not acceptable. Destruction of the concept of freedom of expression, whether in magazines, or elsewhere -- not acceptable. Destruction of any semblance of common sense, such as the hysteria over e-cigs, not acceptable.

I am not accusing you of such wanton destruction of freedoms, constitutional rights, and common sense, just that many liberal who are similarly afflicted with the crusading bug, are eager to destroy anything, in order to give themselves the smug and superior sense of self-satisfaction displayed by PajamaBoy.

You are perfectly free to think that it’s OK to expose immature youths to mass produced hazardous products. I will respectfully disagree.

Thank you for your permission, but I decline, since the concept to which you refer was purely a figment of your imagination. Your sense of moral superiority is, however, noted, however misplaced it may be.