Saturday, January 14, 2012

Is Bhutan the happiest place in the world? - Healthy Living - Health & Families - The Independent

Is Bhutan the happiest place in the world? - Healthy Living - Health & Families - The Independent:

Bhutan sends people to prison - even Buddhist monks - for smoking tobacco.  Tobacco use (except in one's home) is banned on religious grounds.  Tobacco cannot be legally grown, although one can import a small amount if a heavy tax is paid.  I find it interesting that all theocratic (or God-inspired) States - even Buddhist - make the obliteration of personal pleasure their number one priority.  Whether they ban alcohol, tobacco, music, "pornography", consensual adult sexual relations or drugs, the principle is the same: the subordination of personal happiness to the whims of the theocratic elite.

Linked to for the comment at the bottom.

Thank you Michael Stamper.

The article itself is like most of what I expect to read when mainstream journalists cover it.

Smokers should quit, but they also need to work

Inquirer Editorial: Smokers should quit, but they also need to work | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/14/2012:

So what led so many people and corporations to the erroneous conclusion that nicotine addicts should be deprived of something as basic to their survival as employment? Perhaps this country's largely defensible assault on a serious public-health problem has in some instances escalated into a counterproductive and moralistic war on the people we're supposedly trying to help.
Banning smoking from restaurants for the sake of workers and other customers, as well as the possibility that more smokers will think about quitting, makes sense. But denying smokers basic rights and freedoms is too reminiscent of this country's horribly failed attempts to address other drug problems through mass imprisonment. Sure, hate the smoking. But let's love the smokers.

Amazing how many of these editorials I read lately seem to jump to the defense of the poor beleaguered smoker.

It might have been nice if we hadn't been set on a course of hatred and denormalization for so many years.
It might have been easier if labels hadn't been slapped on people so that the world could see people as belonging to differing groups and see people who happen to do different things as different from each other.

There is a part of me that wonders when all the junk studies and manipulations we know to be true come to light if smokers,drinkers,what the world calls obese people will ever feel as if they are a part of the society we used to know or if we will all have made our own places in the world.

It's sad but every single day I feel myself moving further away from the people and the world I used to live in.

But I wonder if I feel different and far away from everything how in the world must these people feel?