Teens: Smoke 'em if....

The NYT shows a series of ads that once told the great health care benefits of the devil weed.

I have received from a regional Starbucks manager a very nice note thanking me for my letter along with a pound of Rwandan coffee and a $25.00 gift card. Someone at SBUX must have read I could be bought off with a breakfast sandwich. (Still no sandwich.)

My goal with this effort is certainly to get SBUX to stop allowing smoking outside their stores. Thus far the response from SBUX, to my efforts, has been to ask me to contact my local government and lobby to have them pass laws that will ban smoking up to 20 feet or so from outside any establishment. Of course Im not sure why we need the government when SBUX is perfectly able themselves to remove the smoking.

I am not a zealot against smokers. It is a very difficult habit to brake and it is still legal. In fact the government wants us to smoke. Here in CT the governor has raised taxes on blow rods to close the budget gap. Sooooo...logic falls that we need MORE smokers to help with our budgetary problems.

I remain perplexed why I have yet to receive from SBUX the reasoning on why they allow smoking, all the while SBUX is in a strategic marketing campaign with the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Not to mention an explanation from the Komen Foundation themselves as to why they would not require SBUX to ban smoking?

It is well known that teenage girls are a large customer base for SBUX. It has also been reported that teen age girls who smoke are at a greater risk of breast cancer. So why with both SBUX and Komen, who market the pink ribbon campaign and local cancer fundraising efforts, not take it upon themselves to stop smoking at SBUX makes little sense.

Or, at least, tell us their logic behind this strange inconsistency of being against smoking before they were/ are for it.