Sunset at Valadero beach in Cuba.

I admit that I like to light up a zig and zag as the sun sets but as the sun didn’t look like setting for sometime I reached for my packet of Pall Mall Red.

The bottom of the pack should have been a clear warning for what was to follow. Sun Ripened Tobacco screamed the clear message in big bold letters for all to read

I thought for a second the message was sun ripened tomatoes but no, the clear message was that the tobacco in my zig and zag was matured in the sunlight which gave it “more taste” Lighting up meant that I had accepted the warning.

If I was to light up I clearly understood that the benefits of sun ripened tobacco was to be outweighed by the fact that with each time I inhaled I would expose myself to more than 40 harmful chemicals.

These chemicals, explained clearly on the packet, would also damage blood vessels, body cells and my immune system. It then went on to promise that these would also lead to chronic illness or premature death. What happened to the benefits of the sun ripened weed? If it’s sun ripened but deadly, it’s as useless as a second prick on a honeymoon

By this stage I was shaking like a dog shitting razor blades. Relief was at hand as I dared to read further that smoking causes irreversible damage to the back of the eye known as macular degeneration. Once central vision is lost blindness may follow. Not a bad thing considering what I was reading.

Selling cigarettes is all above board. It’s legal – despite the amount of chemicals cigarette companies have introduced to their products over the years.

Let me now get to the point of my argument, if I went to my local butcher to buy a kilo of sausages [sometimes know as mystery bags] and the wrapping contained a warning that the chemicals used to produce the snags would give me cancer, cause me blindness and premature death or abort my unborn child you wouldn’t see me for the dust.

Government authorities would be on to the butcher like a seagull on a piece of hot fat before they shut him down and fine him massively.

His business would be ruined, he would be evicted from his house, his wife would leave him and his children would spit on him in the street.

Why does the government treat your local butcher one way and large multinational cigarette companies another way? I would like readers views on this and clearly indicate that I like a fag as much as the next idiot.

My point is that it seems that the nicotine nazis are on the ascendancy. There is nowhere safe to have a cigarette without being hit over the head by the fag fascists. These insidious organisations continually erode the rights of smokers at the same time eroding your civil liberties. If they were fair dinkum they would lobby the government to ban smoking altogether. No half measures. If it’s so lethal, let’s put cigarette companies out of business .

Organisations are springing up telling you what you can eat ,what you can drink or what your children can eat or drink or the movies they can watch.

Ready made experts of nothing in particular spring up on radio, television or the newspapers daily espousing their new age enlightened bullshit.

In reality nothing more than spokespeople for interest groups with an agenda to push down your throat with the view to eroding your civil liberties even more.

An example is commercial radio that draws on the skills of second rate so called experts to tell you what to think and how to act .They can produce an expert on any subject from crime to child adolescents. They tell us how to raise our children, what to feed them, what they can read etc etc .

We don’t have to think for ourselves any, more radio shock jocks and their expert hangers on will do that for us, Thank you!

Have we lost the art of thinking for ourselves? Or are we complicit in allowing the media to do our thinking for us? Let me know.