How much is the tax on one cigarette in NY city?

[BlueCaliDem]

34. I agree. Cigarettes are deadly to SOME people. My father smoked since he was seven years young.

He was in a Japanese concentration camp and smoking helped stop the hunger pangs. All throughout his life, he's never stopped smoking, but it was sodium in his food that eventually gave him high blood pressure and extreme stress from his second wife and her obnoxious children that gave him the brain aneurysm that ruptured and made him a paraplegic with half of one lung collapsed.

When I went to the hospital with him for his bi-annual checkup and they heard that he smoked, they immediately scheduled an appointment for X-rays of his lungs. I can still remember the shocked looks on the three radiologists' faces. They didn't believe the results so my father had to have another X-ray done. I asked why, and the leading X-ray radiologist told me that my father had the lungs of a twenty-eight year old and that couldn't be right. After the second session, though, they had to accept the results and they shook their heads in wonderment that, yes indeedy, he had the lungs of a twenty-eight year old - and he was fifty-nine at the time.

With five children, both of my parents smoked so heavily that we used to joke as kids that when we walked into the living room we were going to London (smoke-filled room looked like the heavy mist London is known for). We grew up in a smoke-filled environment, but none of us have suffered any second-hand smoke while only two of the five took up smoking in our adult years (I'm one of them).