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Are actually amazingly selfless citizens, from a government's point of view. Here's why. (I'm being amazingly cynical here, but Jeremy Clarkson made most of these points on his show).
Average price in Britian for a pack of 20 is £2.40. Around £1.80 of that is tax. So, say you smoke 20 a day, that means you contribute £657 a year to the treasury, in return for it doing NOTHING. This mean, if you smoke from the age of fourteen (fairly common) and die at say 54, you contribute £26,280 more to the national economy than your non-smoking equilivent would. (excluding leap-years)
Sure, you die early, but that's actually good news for the government, as it saves on pension costs and medical bills, to the tune of about twenty years' worth. Now smokers get lung cancer, bronchitus, etc, but unless the treatment costs work out at more than £26,000, the government's making a profit out of that citizen.
Smoker pay additional income tax, work just as well as non- smokers, and then have the decency to kill themselves just before retirement age. I bet governments wish there were more of them.
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