Don’t treat smokers like criminals

In your “Safer Road” editorial (Opinion, Jan 2) you write: “It is astounding that after years of campaigning and education, so many people, especially young people, still smoke.”

To those who have never smoked, this may be astounding, to a person who has experienced and therefore understands every single aspect of this addiction, it was foreseeable that both the smoking ban in its present form and the anti-smoking campaign, as it is conducted, would fail.

For more than two decades I was a heavy smoker. I remember when and why I started, I recall the triggers that made me smoke more or less, I vividly recall equally the good things and the bad things about smoking.