Bat Shit Hall of Fame - Smoking

No matter how you dice it, smoking cigarettes is crazier than bat shit.

Bla bla bla freedom to do what you want with your body. Bla bla bla no link between smoking and cancer because the tobacco company said so. Bla bla bla. Stop being an asshole.

The arguments dished out by smokers about why what they're doing to their lungs isn't anybody else's business are crazy enough to land the entire practice in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame. Second, note, only to Michael Jackson.

Not only does smoking cigarettes give you lung cancer and kill you, it harms those around you with its noxious chemical sprawl. Cigarettes contain 4,000 chemicals, 43 of which are known to cause cancer and 400 of which are considered toxic including nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde (what that frog in biology class was preserved in), ammonia (window cleaner), hydrogen cyanide (obvious), arsenic and DDT.

Delicious! Please exhale on my baby!

Even worse than killing you, smoking can make your life a living hell, like it did for Debi above, the subject of a 1996 California Department of Heath Services anit-smoking campaign.

After smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years, Debi had her larynx removed. The larynx is a very important organ in your body. Without it, you can't speak.

Debi also had a tracheotomy, meaning her body was so fucked up from 30 years of smoking that doctors had to CUT A HOLE IN HER THROAT so that she could breathe. In the picture above, Debi proves that addiction to nicotine is so strong that she's actually still smoking, exhaling the smoke through the hole in her throat. If that doesn't make you want to put your tongue in her mouth, nothing will!

Smoking also makes you look both old, because it gives you tremendous, cavern-like wrinkles, and stupid. There is a direct correlation between level of education and the likelihood that you're a smoker.

"Smoking prevalence was highest among adults who had earned a General Educational Development diploma (42.3%) and lowest among those with graduate degrees (7.2%)," the Center for Disease Control reports.

Also, you are probably poor. "The socioeconomic status of U.S. adults is inversely related to their likelihood of smoking," the CDC finds.

Since in America its the smart people who tend to be able to get their hands on the money (or a system of meritocracy that rewards itself, but that's a different story), it would make sense that smoking would be less common among the elite.

Smokers are therefore walking advertisements that they're both dumb and poor. Good job guys!

As we put smoking in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame we'd like to make one more point. The age-old Libertarian argument that since its your body, your life, you can do with it what you will, is crazier than bat shit.

Because guess who's going to be paying your Medicare bills when you're dragging an oxygen tank around because you've got Emphysema?

You're welcome.