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Originally Posted by scaeagles
But this last line scares me.
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Scares me too, hence the speech at 18. I also included seat belt and helmet laws in there. Thing is, since then, my feelings have changed.
It gets messy when you talk about something as serious as helmets. I've seen numerous studies about how when the helmet laws are put in place, deaths go drastically down, and when you take them off, they go drastically up.
Here's one I just found in a Google search.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conducted the first study, and it found that in the three years following Florida’s decision to repeal its mandatory helmet law in 2000 that there were 933 motorcyclists killed. The number of Florida motorcycle deaths increased 81 percent, an increase from the 515 bikers killed from 1997 to 1999.
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So that's basically 400 extra people dead in 3 years. An ugly, serious fact. Flip the law switch one way, they live, flip it the other, they die. You can say that they're Darwinesque casualties, but they're still human beings with families, parents, children. They just made one bad decision one fateful day.
Yes, these laws can be brought to extremes, with all of us being forcefed prozac and kept in rubber rooms, but there's gray area in between.
As this refers to smoking, though, there's less of a case because of the less direct dangers of smoking. The stupid part to me is that this is classified under health threats, while in my personal subjective opinion, I'm more annoyed about the stink and needing to cough.