By Barry Goldman, News staff

February is Heart Month and while we all try to contribute to fund raising drives for the Heart and Stroke Foundation which raises awareness and money for research and treatment of heart disease, smokers are just dragging us down.
Last year, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, there were 37,000 deaths in Canada attributed to smoking. The Canadian Cancer Society indicates that 21,000 Canadians died last year from lung cancer alone.
Did you know that if you were driving your car and had consumed more than the legal limit of alcohol (80mg of alcohol in 100 ml of blood, known as 0.8), your car insurance is no longer valid? If you had a collision with another car, a person or a concrete barrier, all the damages would have to be paid by you because your insurance company no longer covers you if you are intoxicated.
Then why should our government give health insurance to smokers?
In Canada only 20 per cent of the adult population smoke, but these people use up the vast majority of our health care dollars.  When you consider the time and money used to treat these people, the cost of all their drugs, their hospital care and eventually their final dying days in the most expensive part of the hospital, the Intensive care unit, they are a severe drain on our health system.
Furthermore, what about all the thousands of people they affect with their secondary smoke and all of those heart and lung problems?
Prohibition of addictive substances never works. If we banned the sale of cigarettes an underground black market economy would emerge and there would be just as many smokers. I believe we should follow the example of the insurance companies and revoke the health cards of smokers.
We could set up smoke-cessation programs and give them one year to quit. During that time they would still be covered. However, if they fail to complete the program and are still smoking a year later, then we cancel their OHIP and let them know they are on their own.
They would still have access to all the medical treatment required, but they would have to pay for it out of their own pocket. In a very short period of time smokers would become a rare commodity in this country and within one generation we could stop nearly all the deaths from heart disease and lung cancer.
Most of the money raised for heart disease and lung cancer goes for research into new treatments and new drugs to treat the disease. Very little goes into prevention because it is very difficult to convince young people that anything could ever happen to them. Revoke their health cards and you will get their attention.
Barry Goldman is a former pharmacist who now runs B.J.s Nutrition Centre, located at 720 Upper James St., and writes regularly at barryshealthnews.com. If you would like to write in this space, call editor Gord Bowes at 905-664-8800 ext. 335 to discuss your idea.