"...damn fools and damned souls..."

---

At 04:25 PM 7/19/97 -0400, you wrote:
we all gotta go sometime
if you aint gonna kill yourself with cigarette smoke then you will with bacon if not with fatty foods its with high blood preasure etc etc
people who smoke arent morons like you non-smokers treat us
we know the risk
their a drug and were addicted and we like it that way
there is a risk in everything you do
i have more of a chance of being hit by a car then dying from cigarette smoke
so why arent there any anticar driving web pages?
just let us live our lives....we know the risk already and if wanted to stop we would
so just leave us alone

Jason G.
jg232@psu.edu

      Dear Jason,

      I have no problem with you making the decision to smoke - as long as I don't have to smell it. I took an international flight from Argentina last month where I had to sit for nine hours in the smoking section and I thought I was going to gag. You are an adult and free to make your own decisions as you are free to try to summon up the strength to quit your addiction. But either way you have to live with the results - just like my mother last year the smoker who died a young woman because of cigarettes. I can put it no better than G.K. Chesterson: "The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."

      Very Truly Yours,

      Richard