> Although it is true that some young people drink and/or smoke just to be "cool," which is stupid either way, I don't think comparing the two things is fair at all.
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> Alcohol is neither particularly bad for you or particularly addictive in moderated quantities. Nicotine, by contrast, is harmful and addictive right from the start.
>
> Of course, if you're going to abuse one or the other, abusing alcohol is the worse by far. (The worst nicotine will do to you is kill you.) But that doesn't mean a guy that has even as much as a glass of wine a day is on some slippery slope to alcoholism, and it doesn't help the fight against alcoholism to say so.

I know people who have a glass of wine a day. Some of them are not alcoholics. At least not yet.
Otherwise, I agree, but didn't you shoot down your own comment that comparing drinking and smoking is unfair?

Actually, I don't think I really meant to compare them. But doesn't second hand smoke kill non-smokers just as dead as the non-drinker who are killed by a drunk driver? If you're dead, you're dead. I think I need to go back and see what I said about the slippery slope.
Howard