I am often conflicted with my feelings and empathy for people who smoke. On the one hand I empathize with individuals who are addicted to smoking despite it's known deleterious effects - you can say, I for one also make harmful decisions that affect my health such as my daily coffee fix, or my lacklustre efforts to exercise. And I'm sure many are guilty of such choices that may cause harm to themselves. On the other hand, I innately support governmental actions and policies to eliminate smoking, which incidentally means I support the actions to remove an individual's freedom or choice to smoke. So I succinctly ask: is this hypocrisy excusable? Secondly, as a society, we create laws which discriminate against smokers, but essentially by taking away their freedom of choice to smoke, we are saving their lives, hence is this form of discrimination justifiable?