10%

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"Smokers are gasping at higher cigarette and cigar prices as the largest federal tobacco tax increase in history takes effect.

"Oh my gosh," Bernardo Torres said Tuesday when a clerk at a CVS Pharmacy in Falls Church, Va., told him the new price, which went up in anticipation of the tax increase. Torres wanted to buy his aunt two cartons of cigarette-size cigars, but he walked away empty-handed after hearing the new price: $134. The tax on little cigars went from 4 cents to $1.01 a pack"

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I think that only an evolutionary psychologist could really explain it – but it seems that no matter what the cost or what the price, 10% of people will take 20 years off their lives to smoke cigarettes.

That’s also the percentage of service people who came back from Vietnam addicted to heroin that stayed addicted after getting treatment.

The bottom of the barrel or the evolutionary cream at the top?

I think that maybe smokers are nature’s way of keeping in reserve a percentage of the population aside just in case a bug or disease kills everyone without enough nicotine in their system.

Like some malignant irritable bowel syndrome brought on by mutated bacteria -- that results in all non-smokers dying by the internal sloughing of their innards, as the agonies of their projectile diarrhea scare away their families as they loosen, then lose, of all their bodily fluids on empty playgrounds outside of hospitals too full to let them in.

Ironically, right next to huddled, frozen smokers no longer welcomed inside either.

I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the Sun now stands, I will smoke no more forever.. Though my war is over, my compassion for the lonely 10% remains unchanged. As long as they don’t smoke too close to me.