To be sure, smoking in excess is a health risk, and all the warnings about it should be understood and regarded, but I'm not entirely sure that the pearl-clutching around cigarettes is warranted -- at least not to the degree that it's at today. 

In fact, it's gotten so bad that now the Biden administration sees smoking as one more thing it can nanny state away. As Fox News reports, the Biden administration wants to undergo a second prohibition by banning menthol cigarettes entirely: 

The FDA's proposed rule would "prohibit menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and all characterizing flavors (other than tobacco) in cigars." The government justifies its action because it has "the potential to significantly reduce disease and death from combusted tobacco product use."

Firstly, if people want to risk disease and death from cigarettes, then that's their business. If the government is truly concerned about disease and death from consumption of certain materials then why aren't we seeing a lot of concern about hormone-infused food or microplastics? We've got so many seed oils and sugars in everything we consume that it's out of control. I would feel safer smoking an entire pack of cigarettes than taking some of the medications we've normalized in our society. 

You want to talk about a filthy habit? The state of America's food is so disgusting that I'm surprised there's not more alarm around it. Why isn't the Biden administration tackling that issue? 

Until the 1970, the majority of the people were fit as a fiddle! No keto, vegan, or paleo diets. No home aerobics or gym memberships. No fancy fitness tech or wellness influencers. They also weren't drinking protein shakes or counting calories.

So, what went wrong? A THREAD 🧵⬇️ pic.twitter.com/dCnHWL1QLq

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) November 24, 2023

Yet, we put all the villainization on the tobacco industry as if it's a chief killer in America. Never mind that heart disease brought on by overconsumption and a lack of activity reign supreme.

Here's an interesting fact. As America continues to warp speed itself further into an obesity problem, smokers tend to weigh less. According to The Guardian it's still unclear as to why, but researchers think it has to do with chemicals that possibly activate the body's metabolism, cigarettes suppressing appetites...or both. 

Researchers believe that smoking also wards off dementia: 

Many dementias go hand-in-hand with a loss of chemical receptors in the brain that just happen to be stimulated by nicotine. Smoking seems to bolster these receptors, and smokers have more of them. The theory is that smokers may then have more to lose before they start losing their minds. "It does seem that nicotine has a preventative effect, but the problem is that the other stuff in the cigarette tends to rot everything else," says Roger Bullock, a specialist in dementia and director of the Kingshill Research Centre in Swindon. So if your time is nearly up anyway, and you have somehow managed to steer a course past the Scylla and Charybdis of heart attacks and tumours, smoking might just help you retain your marbles.

Retaining marbles is also something smoking helps with when it comes to the stresses of everyday life, and these little moments of peace have benefits too. Smoking does indeed "calm the nerves" but what it's really doing is inducing a shot of adrenaline that makes anxiety feel easier to deal with. Moreover, smokers tend to move outside to smoke, exposing them to more vitamin D, a key component in a large amount of cellular functions such as muscle function and brain cell activity. 

To be clear, I'm not saying smoking is a healthy habit to pick up and that the hazards of smoking cigarettes have health benefits that outweigh the negatives. Far from it. Smoking regularly can really be a damaging thing to do to your body in many ways. Moreover, nicotine is pretty addictive, and you can easily go from smoking randomly to smoking regularly pretty easily. 

However, a cigarette from time to time won't kill you. In fact, it might be helpful in more than a few ways. 

This country was founded with tobacco being a huge cash crop. Tobacco usage in America is older than the country's founding, and we managed to become the greatest country in the world while we puffed away on tobacco products of all varieties. There are a myriad of things we could get up in arms about, but cigarettes rank very low all things considered. 

Cigarettes, even menthol cigarettes, should be enjoyed responsibly just like any recreational substance. They're hardly the devil in our society, and to be honest, compared to many of the things we've normalized in this day and age, cigarettes are far more innocent. 

Smoke em if you got em.