about 800 Americans die every year from fires caused by "careless smoking," but 440,000 Americans die every year as a result of smoking cigarettes properly.

You could make the same argument about gun safety locks. I think the same principle applies. I have no problem with this cigarette law.

Well, short of banning smoking outright (which would only do for cigarettes what the stunning effective War on Drugs has done for illegal narcotics), there's not much more that can be done. People are already compelled to smoke outside in almost all contexts. Here in Maine, it's illegal to smoke in the car with a child. So, pace your comment, there really is a lot of regulation in place to combat the health impact of smoking.

On the other hand, house fires from cigarettes cause a great deal of property damage, and can cause greater immediate harm to those around the smoker than the slow accretion of secondhand smoke.

This is a lot like adding a safety to a pistol or airbags to a car. The good news is that, by taking smoking out of public places [can you imagine someone lighting up at a movie theater?] and by making them less likely to start a fire, cigarettes are less and less of a threat to non-smokers. And that's a good thing.

Wouldn't it be great if firearms could be made to shoot only at hardened criminals? Or if cars were programmed to only kill drunk drivers?

I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. When cigarettes only kill the idiots who smoke them, only idiots will smoke cigarettes.

Note to self: Start a new cigarette brand called:

"Natural Selection."

"Natural Selection. Guaranteed for the life of the smoker!"

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that people are not physically addicted to house fires.

We've done a lot to try to reduce the number of tobacco addicts in this country already, and it's not like we can ban the stuff.

I've had this wacko idea for awhile: that the Federal government should:

1) buy up the tobacco manufacturers, importers, and distributors,
2) ban new entrants to those fields,
3) cease all tobacco advertising and related PR, and
4) otherwise continue to operate the acquired businesses as before.

As a financial transaction, it would be pretty much a break-even deal for the Feds: tobacco consumption would decline over time in the absence of advertising, but the absence of advertising would reduce costs right from the beginning.

And it would have a tremendously positive effect on the health of Americans.

Crazy, huh?

"Something seems wrong with this picture."

Kinda like seat belt laws when it is perfectly OK to ride a motorcycle with/without a helmet?

Or charging someone for murder for the death of a fetus during the commission of a crime, while abortion of the same fetus would be perfectly legal?

Whew. Now those 800 can die from cancer like everyone else!

Well, at least they look cool, right?

As a smoker (trying repeatedly to quit, BTW) the picture seems perfectly clear. Smokers just kill themselves by smoking, but cigarette fires can kill innocent nonsmokers. The government seems powerless to save smokers from themselves, but they will at least try to prevent smokers from accidentally killing their neighbors in fires.

Fires can kill anyone near the smoker, not just the smoker himself. Smoking is a major cause of fires, one of the top ten, I think. As a fire-safety issue it makes complete sense.

There are a lot of reasons why bad habits and behaviors harmful only to the person with the bad habit are tolerated.

People that die in house fires don't need lucrative chemotherapy drugs and worse yet... these are loyal customers that no longer buy cigarettes!

Quick death... where's the profit in THAT?

Or charging someone for murder for the death of a fetus during the commission of a crime, while abortion of the same fetus would be perfectly legal?

In both cases, it is up to the choice of the woman who is pregnant. In the event that she is not judged competent to express her wishes, the conservative assumption is that she intended to carry on with her pregnancy. It's not that hard to make sense of your puzzle.

As a financial transaction, it would be pretty much a break-even deal for the Feds: tobacco consumption would decline over time in the absence of advertising, but the absence of advertising would reduce costs right from the beginning.

I have heard the case made, by a political economist, that smoking is a net financial win -- at the time the case was made, the costs of care for smoking-related illness, was more than offset by the savings to pensions and social security from early death. Those numbers depend, of course, on lots of things things that may have changed, including the cost of medical care, and the estimation of who exactly is affected by the smoking. (Death by fire is not as good as another commenter thinks, because it can often kill people who are still productively contributing to SS or pensions, and fires sometimes leave survivors, who may draw benefits for a very long time.)

All that said, I think your idea is an excellent one -- all addictive drugs should be sold by the government, at relatively low cost, in boring rectangular buildings painted sea-foam green, lit by cheap fluorescent fixtures (that buzz). The entire enterprise will be run by leftovers from the W-Bush administration.

Kinda like seat belt laws when it is perfectly OK to ride a motorcycle with/without a helmet?

Both of those depend on the state, don't they? Let me guess: You live in one that requires the first and not the second, and man, are you rankled by the injustice. Fume!

Seriously, though, the public-interest arguments for motorcycle helmets and seatbelts are different. For the former, it's pretty much confined to "Massive head trauma costs the state a whole lot of money."

For the latter, the direct benefits to other individuals' safety are pretty clearly defined: 1) a restrained driver has a much better chance of maintaining or regaining control of the car in case of a skid, sideswipe, etc., and 2) some incredible number of serious injuries and fatalities are caused by unrestrained people colliding with each other inside a vehicle. By the time a motorcyclist's head hits the pavement, control of his bike/collision with others is pretty much not an issue.

3) cease all tobacco advertising and related PR

As a former quitter, I'd also like to see it sold only in tobacco stores. Make it difficult to access and expensive to purchase. That would cure me.

By the time a motorcyclist's head hits the pavement, control of his bike/collision with others is pretty much not an issue. -shortstop

Reading your comment conjured up images of Billy Crystal explaining the differences between mostly dead and all dead.

Have fun storming the castle!

It might be time to see that movie again.

It's always time to see that movie again.

Yeah, it is. One thing: go ahead and allow sales of nicotine containing beverages to adults. At least it gives people an affordable way to get nicotine (not harmless in itself, I know) without having to ruin their lungs or faces with what comes from smoking or chewing.

If I understand this correctly, cigarettes that kill a relatively small number of people quickly have been or will be banned in most of the United States. At the same time, cigarettes that kill a huge number of people slowly are perfectly legal, and largely unregulated.

WTF? They're the same cigarettes. They're all regulated. If a cigarette satisfies the regulations, that doesn't make it "unregulated".

Regulation is in place to prevent the deaths of the smaller number of people because it was politically feasible. People are addicted to nicotine, not self-immolation.

Want to quit smoking? Spend a day or two with an emphysema patient in the hospital. Seriously. It worked for me.

I shattered my right kneecap in an accident nearly seven years ago. Because space was tight at the hospital, they put me in a room with a guy who was literally drowning in his own mucus. The nurses had to vacuum his lungs out every five minutes or so, and I had to listen to his sad helpless wheezing in between for nearly two straight days. There was no treatment, no cure, no hope of recovery. The guy was suffocating in the middle of an open room and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it.

I quit instantly after smoking for decades and haven't touched a cigarette since. Every breath I take is appreciated as a real blessing, and I'm just glad I got religion before it was too late.

No wonder Americans are upset with their government's wasteful spending. We go out of our way to regulate these 'safer' cigarettes and a bridge falls in Minneapolis.

Priorities really do matter!

MarkH, could you rephrase that more intelligibly?

Steve, I think the reason for this is that a house fire started by a cigarette can also kill the smoker's family and anyone else in the house, quickly.

Smoking is harmful, yes. Smoking does sometimes kill smokers slowly through disease. This is just a safeguard against devastating fire.

Ok, I know some of you are 'liberals', and by that, I mean you think 'there oughta be a law'. But the rest of you, what's your excuse?

The cigarette companies put chemicals in the paper to make them burn the cigarette like a fuse. For all you know these may be the chemicals that give some people cancer.

For a slight additional price, you can buy cigarette papers without the chemicals. The cigarettes I smoke go out if you don't puff on them regularly. The free papers that come with the tobacco I roll have the chemicals- a cigarette made with those papers burns like a fuse.

I've wondered for 35 years why the fire chiefs have never spoken out about this.

Sounds like some of the people on this thread would like to keep smoking as dangerous as possible, so the bad smokers will 'pay the price' and serve as a lesson to us all. Kind of an abstinence thing, if you think about it....

Let's briefly review drug prohibition. That's right. Used to disenfranchise minorities, destroy the black family, and keep segregation in place by other means. Cost to us- about $35 billion a year. Benefits- zippo.

Let's briefly review alcohol prohibition. That's right, murders in streets, poison hootch, and, eventually, mob politics controlling every major city in America. Yeah, that was fun.

And here's another little secret- a lot of smokers don't actually smoke. They light a cigarette, hold it while it burns, and stub it out. Bystanders breathe more of their smoke than they do.

Nobody should be allowed to put chemicals in the cigarette paper that make it burn, and the fire chiefs are about a century late to the party. Couple that with a strict ban on advertising and a stiff tax on manufactured cigarettes and sales would drop like a stone.

It might be the most effective thing we could do to cut smoking.

"Something seems wrong with this picture."

Steve, the difference is that fires kill people (in all but extremely rare cases) involuntarily, but cigarette smoking is voluntary.

Catowner makes a point about cigarettes being designed to burn down even when not actively being smoked. This is also achieve by packing the tobacco into the cigarette as lightly as possible without the whole thing just collasping while the smoker (poser) holds it.

If the FDA regulated the content and composition of cigarettes they could eliminate the unnecessary carcinagines (formaldihyde anyone?) and insist that the cigarette be packed full. The result would be more expensive to make, but less expensive to consume because one would last the user longer. A two pack a day addict might find themselves down to five cigarettes a day.

That of course would also reduce both Federal and State tobacco sales revenues. So don't expect any action in that direction.