It's an old joke among mental health workers that people with schizophrenia live for three things: Coffee, food and cigarettes. Schizophrenics still have access to food and coffee, but today we live in a country in which smoking is forbidden in most places and the cost of a pack of cigarettes is prohibitive for the poor--and most people with severe mental illness are poor.
These changes were made for the benefit of "society", but the people whom they benefit are primarily middle-class people who can quit smoking if they choose to do so. The laws punish those who have the hardest time quitting smoking (and may have no incentive to do so) and can least afford the financial cost of cigarettes.
People with the worst cases of chronic schizophrenia live in state psychiatric hospitals, where smoking is forbidden. Even if they had the money, they could not choose to smoke.
Years ago, a schizophrenic patient commented to me that he didn't understand how I could drink coffee without smoking cigarettes--"because the coffee brings you up, and then the cigarettes even you out." Some may think that the psychiatric medications our pharmaceutical companies have created are substitutes for cigarettes and coffee, but they aren't. They don't provide pleasure nor do they have a social aspect. And many of them cause weight gain and diabetes. Diabetes is a fatal illness--a fact many people forget. Smoking kills, but so does obesity.
Well-meaning policymakers--as well as grandstanding politicians--often don't think about the consequences of their actions on society's vulnerable members.
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