[J.C.]

I'm not surprised there are so many different opinions on this subject, and as someone who smoked for a long period I am only too aware of the stupidity of it. In fact I gave up recently, using the new Champix drug (mainly paid for by the Nhs) which directly affects the brain and made quitting far more simple than earlier efforts.

I asked my local shopkeeper how much he loses from my quitting and he told me that he only got 30 p per packet. It's probably a fair assumption that the companies make about the same. So with 13 million uk smokers averaging about a packet per day this would leave the government with a take of about £2000,000,000 (£2 billion)per annum !!

There is no justification for the tax other than the cost to the health service, and we shouldn't overlook that most of these costs are currently being spent on those smokers who are now over about 50, 60 and 70 years old.

In the earlier part of the 20th century smoking was actually advertised as being good for your health, with such claims as the soothing of an itchy throat or cough. Then in the 70's it was advertised as being cool to smoke with such adverts as the all Amercan Cowboy and words like 'welcome to marlboro country' so I tend to blame the governments more than the smokers.

Now of course it's all different and the true facts read very badly.
8 out of ten non smokers live past 70 but only 5 out of ten smokers do.
17,000 children under 5 years old are admitted to hospital each year because of their parents smoking.

At this present moment I am well in credit in that I have spent thousands on this tax and had very little back as yet. Yikes, that worries me and I hope I can keep it that way.

I really don't want to argue this one way or the other apart from pointing out that there is a difference between smokers from the middle to late century compared to now. Perhaps they should reflect the tax directly to costs that the statistics now show. However if they do that I still think that the tax may well be more than the cost because the reality is most of it actually goes on our defence budget and such things, though I am happy to be corrected on that.??

Edit: The tax revenue from smoking is in fact a whopping £7 billion. My apologies to sunny_01 for not picking that up in her post.