Sixteen Years

Today marks the 4^th anniversary of my quitting smoking for the last of many times. I mostly hate the damned things now, and I favor every flavor of prohibiting smoking in places non-smokers breathe. Yet still sometimes, when I catch a whiff of smoke, I find the sentence forming in my brain — Could you spare one of those?

There is no better emblem of the failure of our political system than the fact that this highly addictive, frequently fatal, and always health-damaging drug is not only legal, but government subsidized, while our prisons are overflowing with people whose "crime" involved a vastly more innocuous substance.