Of course I have not smoked since the diagnosis of the larynx cancer, and I had smoked only irregularly in the decade before then, but I'd imagine that my serious attempts to quit would number well into the double figures. Sometimes I'd go a year smoke free, but always it was hard.

I do know people who continue to smoke after they've been treated for a smoking-related cancer, and while this may be understandable in the case of a terminal prognosis it is less so when these people appear to have been given a second chance. It is shocking and sad, but I think I understand that quitting may be too hard for some at certain times. It may be a related response that for four or five years after my treatment I declined to have any of the standard cancer tests for men of my age because I felt that I'd had enough of the anxieties of cancer!

Those of us who don't use hard drugs are contemptuous of those who do, and non smokers, and perhaps especially reformed smokers, are contemptuous of smokers. Yet many of us know little or nothing of one or both addictions. The difficulty of quitting for some must be at times insurmountable, and we make no allowance for that. We would be more fairly critical of the original decision to try hard drugs or tobacco, but for the great majority of people that is so long ago we should spare ourselves the trouble.

We are more supportive of smoking and smokers, as in allowing pubs and clubs to have them on the premises, than we are of other junkies, heroin addicts among them, and I'm not sure that is fair. Are you? And are we too quick to look upon both with contempt?