In 1968, we took cigarette advertising off the television airwaves and print media in our country. C. Everett Koop, our Surgeon General, predicted that the US would virtually have a “smokeless” society by the year 2000.

As a smoker at that time, I laughed at that notion; I quit in 1990 and have never turned back. As we crept closer to 2000 I basically saw Koop’s prediction coming true. Motivated by the over-whelming evidence of the health hazards of smoking we spent millions, maybe billions of dollars, trying to eliminate smoking.

We have basically achieved our goal; that is until now. We are now seeing more and more local and state voter initiatives to legalize marijuana, either for everyone or running under of guise of for “medicinal” or “recreational” purposes.

I think this is prepos-terous, especially after we have spent the last 45 years trying to convince the masses that smoking is dangerous and can be hazardous to your health.

Recently, the British Lung Foundation claimed that, contrary to popular belief, smoking a cannabis cigarette is up to 20 times more likely to give you lung cancer than smoking a tobacco cigarette. This is an early study, however, what we do know is that inhaling any smoke is bad for you.

Smoke is a bunch of particulates and gases re-leased during combustion, and both tobacco and cannabis smoke will contain harmful substances such as sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Putting these things into your body is not likely to be good for your long-term health.

The whole notion of legalizing weed flies in the face of all that we have worked for in the past 45 years. Someone has to convince me how legalizing another hazardous drug and highly probable carcinogen provides any positive benefit to society in general.