Cigarettes- outrageous tax on poor people

      I am very lucky that I never started to smoke. I grew up with those insidiously seductive commercials on TV. I think I puffed on a cigarette just a few times. For me it was not Springtime Again.  A veteran RIPTA bus rider, studying the people in Kennedy Plaza almost every day, I observe that cigarette smoking is mostly a habit of the poorest of the poor.  Obvious derelicts ask you , beg you, for a nicotine fix. Some take  filthy ( diseased? ) butts  right from the gutter. Many poor people must spend a huge chunk of their income on cigarettes. And so needy are they for tobacco, I wonder if they are not at least petty thieves.

        George Orwell pointed out in " Down and Out in Paris and London " that it is only to be expected that poor people will not easily give up the little pleasures in their wretched life. When you consider what  a person on SSI gets per month - just a few hundred dollars- it does seem to be " cruel and unusual punishment " for a cigarette addict to pay so much for his daily fix. I'll bet he or she pays almost as much in public housing rent.

             If we legalized most popular drugs - and modestly taxed them - the smoking poor could get some merciful relief. Or they might discover a less lethal alternative to nicotine.

      The war on drugs is an absurd and costly failure.