It's relevant because every time you take a foot outside your door, you have a huge increase in chance of death.

You live life, you get through it, you deal with the problems. Nicotine is an addiction, but its also self medication, and for that reason, hard to live without.

Everyone and their mom in america is on adirol or zoloft or any of a thousand pills or combinations of them. 

Then you die and it's over. There's nothing you can do. You can live your whole life smoking and get killed by a mugger. You can never smoke your whole life, then get alzheimers or diabetes.

Or, you may get skin cancer from a type of plastic that the FDA or whoever, said was safe.

Or howabout how obesity is now the number one killer?

As a similar analogy to smoking, let's look at obesity. Mcdonalds 1$ menu, etc. It's been shown that the highest caloric foods with the worst ingredients and care are some of the cheapest foods. Poor people often become fat because they must work and work and work, and often have no time or money to make food or buy proper food. The result is an entire nation of people who eat cheap calorie meals and are getting fat, and dying from it.

You could say the same for those people. "They have a choice not to eat those foods", but really, they don't. They need SOMETHING, and that is really the only something that is keeping them going. It is a very similar way to cigarettes and self-medicating with them. Cigarettes stave off hunger, have a numbing agent, and make you more alert. So, people who don't sleep enough, work long tiresome hours, and don't make enough money, food and cigarettes go hand in hand.

You can choose to agree or not, just beware that you are arguing with a fatalist. Just because you raise your ODDS to live by not smoking, doesn't for a second mean that you will. That is the great oversight.

I specifically said that one of the main disadvantages of smoking is the effects it has on your "growth". It's harder to get in shape, harder to feed yourself well. I do not believe the smoking cessation is as huge a deal towards "living-or-not", but I do see smoking as bad for self-improvement, and interaction with others due to hygiene. 

Do you honestly believe this?  Going out to eat on a daily basis has nothing to do with lack of time to make something, people are just lazy.  If somebody truly is that busy on weekdays (although I doubt they wouldn't have 40 minutes to make supper), then something that works amazing is to make a couple of big meals on the weekend that will last you through the week.  People have ample time to make meals, it is 100% their choice to go out to eat instead because it takes less time and doesn't involve doing dishes, etc.

you are no fatalist. a fatalist doesn't argue, he doesn't need to make excuses for what he does and  that is what you do!

you make lots of points, but they ultimately are just excuses for you to keep smoking. i wonder why you need those excuses? i'm not judging you, i'm just tired of people bringing up things that are completely unrealated to the subject at hand.

no it is not their choice. I know several people who work 60 hours a week without a day off for months, and are simply so tired and worn that they have little choice.

Knowing what the solutions are doesn't make it any easier to do something. It is a very difficult process of overcoming these kinds of hurdles to getting on the right track, and your response, I have to say, is incredibly naive.

If you really say so, trust me, even if I was tired, I'd still be making my own meals working that much because fast food gets disgusting after a while.

I quit cold turkey for over 2 months. I felt great etc but when I had started a new job, everyone smoked. There would be days I would end up in a bad mood and eventually just caved in and started again. Now it's been harder then ever to quit and I regret starting again :S I'm on hopefully my last pack right now and I'm gonna try to kick the habit as I want to focus more on paintballing and actually saving money.

I'm not arguing for myself nor making excuses. I'm arguing against the idea of this topic and the responses to it.

I've quit smoking for an entire year, just to see if I could do it. For me, I simply enjoy smoking. 

Perhaps you may see my points as simply excuses for smokers in general, but I strongly believe that people are a product of their environment for bad or for worse, people often do not have a choice in what they do.

The pourpose of this thread was the OP asked us to support him to quit smoking and i tried to help, so you telling me i should not have done that because...?

specifically, I, agree with you. I find it hard to eat out all the time, and I make most of my own food. But I also do not presume that other people have as much choice in the matter as I do.

ah, you'll have to excuse me then, I was responding to other comments within the thread, moreso than the OP.

The only problem I have with helping someone quit is by telling them they won't die, or showing lungs, etc. In the mind of a smoker, those things don't work.

What works is actual help. You tell yourself, "I'm going to do this because I said I would do it, and my word means nothing otherwise", or "substitute smoking with pushups. Everytime you feel the urge to smoke, go to the bathroom and do 10 pushups", or "continue as normal, but don't inhale once you taste how disgusting the cigarettes are, you will easily kick the habit".

To me these "solutions" of showing a cancerous lung etc, are simply the solutions of people who have never smoked a day in their life.