Sorry to hear bout your mother. My uncle died from lung cancer, and I've no doubts another will too (three packs a day smoker).

I never smoked, and I expect I never will. My parents didn't smoke, and although they never spoke ill of people who do, it was simply common sense that smoking is a bad addiction and shouldn't be done.

I blame the assorted poisons people put in the tobacco before pushing them as cigs.

I was interested in why cigarettes contain several wicked metallic and radioactive elements. I had heard that the cigarette companies put them in the product—I wouldn’t put anything past them. But I read somewhere (arg, I didn’t note the reference) about what’s going on out in the tobacco patch, long before the companies start processing the sticky leaves:

1.) Plants concentrate the naturally-occurring elements and compounds in the soil. This is why plants figure into toxin-abatement programs. So if the soil is rich in the oxides of cadmium, uranium, thorium, and so on, these chemical species can be concentrated in plants (see number 3 to find out why the soil has so much of these chemical species in it).

2.) Tobacco is related to tomatoes. Both plants have hairy leaves, and tobacco has been selectively bred for thousands of years to have sugary, sticky leaves. Under an electron microscope, you can see the tiny structures these plants use to deter the insect pests who come swarming to devour them. Nicotine itself is a poison designed by the tobacco plant to protect itself from being eaten.

3.) Soils contain clay, and clay is made of very, very fine mineral grains—clay is made of the crushed mountains of long-ago days. Common garden soil is full of magnificent stories, echoes of black thundering dawns on the slopes of towering stratovolcanos, pouring forth the molten radioactive soul of Earth’s crust a billion years before the first dinosaur hatched. Those rocks, whether a million or a billion years old, have gone to dust, muddying brown creeks and streams, leaving their gray powders on white walls and automobiles, and incidentally, the oxides of uranium and thorium and polonium and so on, glued onto the sticky, furry structures of the common tobacco leaf. Nobody planned for it to happen. Nobody planned for Earth’s clay and mud and mudrocks to be radioactive, they just are. Nobody put the sticky tobacco leaves in the way of the blowing radioactive dust. But that’s the way it is—if you smoke something that was sticky and grew in a field, you’re going to get radioactive minerals blown down your bronchial passages and they’re going to lodge in your lungs for a long time. Shooting out alpha and beta particles in every direction, poking holes in tissues and playing mortal billiards with your DNA.

Unfortunately for us apes, it poisons us in a fun way…lighting up our brains in a powerful mini-trip that seizes our emotional centers and drags them into another world for a few delirious seconds. In the caves of Peten, paintings on the walls of caves known only to the Maya priesthood show men of God smoking cigars of great strength—whose nicotine-induced hallucinations produced visions of their own ancestors from the opaque clouds, bearing news of the great deeds and dooms to come in the lives of America’s kings.

The propaganda mills of communist Russia had it right in their 2-tone poster showing a cartoon of a man with his cigarette (government-made) and his black lungs. It read:

Ne Kuritye

(Do Not Smoke.)

Wow, sounds like you know a lot.

Naah, Wikipedia knows a lot...sometimes about useful things besides Goatse and Knuckles the Echidna....

Ah, yes, Wikipedia... everyone seems to love it. :3

*snugs gently* Cigs are evil.

Considering the chemical blackmail that the substance is exerting over your Mama, I think (and since I don't know you all, I may be terribly wrong) ...that emotional extortion is OK in this kind of hostage situation. Things like:

"...would you like to see me graduate from [fill in the blank]?"
"I imagine it wasn't easy being pregnant with me, now I have another difficult request"
"Next Tuesday, every time you light up, I'm going to stick this X-acto knife into myself right where you can see it. Will that make you uncomfortable? That's what it feels like watching you suffering from this addiction"

I'm right in there with you in this struggle. I'm not there, and I don't know you from Adam n' Eve, but my best friend is a heavy smoker, and I'm preparing myself for the silence that will follow the day when I'm one of his pall bearers.