This headline: Read the Warning, Light a Cigarette? caught my eye today and reading through the letters, and this one really stood out to me:

It really made me think about how we sometimes view sin - we refuse to recognize the harm that sin has in our lives - if it doesn't hurt anyone else, why should I stop doing it?  Who are you to look down on me for my sin, if I enjoy it?  Why should you deny my human nature?

To the Editor:

As someone who has no intention of quitting smoking, I must say that Martin Lindstrom’s article doesn’t surprise me in the least. It doesn’t take a scientific study to tell us that campaigns to bully people out of their pleasures only work up to a point — especially when you’re trying to bully taxpaying adults out of enjoying a legal product.

The discrimination and stigmatization that smokers have to deal with on a daily basis may well push some into quitting, but they make others increasingly angry and defiant.

It’s one thing to be antismoking, but it’s quite another to deny that tobacco gives pleasure and comfort to millions, to deny that many of us are deeply skeptical of the antismoking movement and, ultimately, to deny human nature.

Antitobacco scaremongering is indeed at, or beyond, the point of being counterproductive.

I suggest an alternative, though it may strike some as radical. How about just leaving us alone? Joe Jackson

New York, Dec. 12, 2008