Cigarette smoking is hazardous to your health. This is common knowledge.

So what is the point of having a smoke-free campaign, other than to state the obvious?

This isn’t elementary school, where little children need to be made aware of the dangers of smoking, or high school, where we ignore all we’ve been taught and start lighting up during lunch.

It is completely illogical for people to waste their time informing others about an issue of which everyone is already aware.

In college, where we’re all adults, everyone is accountable for their own actions. If students choose to smoke after spending long hours in a dull classroom, they are aware of what they are doing.

It’s difficult to take such campaigns seriously due to its early roots in racism. For example how the modern anti-smoking campaign first began in Nazi Germany; were the propaganda depicted the act of smoking as being associated with groups that were seen as undesirable.

Anti-smoking advocates often employ a combination of fear tactics, propaganda and demonization of the industry and its patrons. Their lies include the idea that one cigarette can get an individual addicted, that the tobacco industry targets children and that smokers die at a young age.

Yet they fail to mention that modern medicine has increased a person’s life expectancy rate and smokers develop a taste for tobacco over time.

The truth is that most people started to smoke because they tried it and liked it. Nobody forced or pressured them into doing it as a ritual of acceptance, and only an idiot would think smoking would make them look cool.

Finally, there are the stories of how the tobacco industry profits from smokers dying. First off, no industry benefits from death (except health insurance companies, Blackwater and Halliburton).

The only people who gain something from tobacco illnesses are the anti-smoking groups, who parade around dying people using the corpse-count in their favor and nothing more than propaganda.

To top it off, the anti-smokers I’ve encountered tend to be more rude and disrespectful than smokers. Most smokers always put out their cigarettes if someone asks them to. Yet anti-smokers always make some kind of ridiculous, childish scene that draws unnecessary attention.

Why is so much attention being paid to smoking when there are other substances killing people in greater numbers? Obesity is the leading cause of death in America, yet there are no Surgeon General warnings on a Big Mac.

Death is unavoidable. People need to abandon this fantasy that it’s possible to live forever by cutting out one act.

Or in the words of comedian Bill Hicks, “Non-smokers die every day, good luck living.”