As a former smoker and lung cancer survivor I refuse to take full responsibility for the addiction or the disease.  While it is true that I decided to try smoking at a young age I had no idea that the nicotine contained in cigarettes was so addictive and that it would take total control of my life.  When I first tried smoking in the early and mid 1950s the tobacco companies were just beginning to manipulate the ingredients in tobacco.  They knew that increasing the amount of nicotine in their products would increase their customers' nicotine addiction and thereby increase the sales of their products.  Breaking the addiction to nicotine is very difficult and for some addicts it is impossible.  

I was fortunate in being able to break the nictione addiction.  However, five years after I quit smoking I was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Heavy smokers like I was can develop lung cancer three to five years after one quits tobacco use.   As fate would have it I only lost a lung to cancer.  Other tobacco users and lung cancer victims have given their lives.

It was a number of years after the Master Tobacco Settlement in 1998 before the tobacco companies's representatives would admit that they knew that nicotine was addictive and that they had hidden that fact from the public and their customers.

I share this information because it is my firm belief that the tobacco companies will do anything and everything in an effort to sell their legal but deadly product.  This includes making every effort that they can to get young people addicted to their product. 

Putting the tobacco companies under the watchful eye(s) of the Food and Drug Administration, in my opinion, is not enough to protect the public and our youth from the dangers of tobacco use.  One step in the right direction would be a mandated "black box" warning paper included in each and every pack of cigarettes, package or tin of smokeless tobacco and chewing tobacco similar to those included in all drug prescriptions.   That "black box" warning paper should include the dangers related to tobacco use and the information on how to break the nicotine addiction that is inevitable with any use of tobacco use. Our youth need to have the information about the true dangers of tobacco use before they even attempt to start.  They have to be smart and not start using tobacco.

I, like so many others before me, made the choice to try tobacco use but we didn't make the choice of nicotine addiction, illnesses or possilbe death caused by tobacco use.