Be careful of what you wish for

“The world can only be grateful for the precision and insistence with which doctors remind it of the dangers of smoking; that is their job. But the suspicion here is that the passions and uses to which that information is being put are wildly dispropotionate to the danger that tobacco poses – particularly other people’s smoke. For the moment, cigarettes have become the focus or fetish of puritanical prohibitions like those that, in the past, periodically constrained freedom and censored pleasure in the name of protecting the collective well-being from harm, but always under the darker suspicion of wishing to increase state control or to control other interests.”
(Richard Klein, “Cigarettes are sublime”, Picador, 1995, pp15)