I don’t know if this is airing in other areas of the country, but here in New York there is an ongoing ad campaign featuring a series of nauseating commercials aimed at getting people to stop smoking.

The first commercial featured an immigrant who “swam like a fish” in his home country, but once he came to the U.S. and took up smoking he had to have a tracheotomy and now has a hole in his throat so that if he swam again he would immediately drown. The second commercial features a woman who proudly shows all of her stumps and stubs – the result of 10 or so amputations to her hands and feet, once again the result of smoking.

The latest commercial shows a 30-something Mom stepping out on the back porch for a quick smoke. Cut to an image of a cloud of smoke billowing down her windpipe, followed by her brain being plopped on a counter and sliced open like a top round to show the blood clots that form from smoking.

These commercials always seem to find their way onto the air when I am eating breakfast and watching the morning news, or trying to relax with a bowl of ice cream or slice of pie after dinner.

I wonder what the next target will be? Will we be watching diseased livers being sliced open to dissuade us from drinking? Or perhaps we'll be forced to view liposuction machines working pumping out fat to turn us against hamburgers, candy bars, buttered popcorn, potato chips, glazed doughnuts and any other food some politician in City Hall or Albany deems as dangerous.

It’s interesting that the tide is still turning against cigarettes while “medical” marijuana is being legalized in New Jersey and New York City recently spent $32,000 of taxpayer money on a four-color brochure to show the proper way to shoot up heroine.

I should point out that I am an avid non-smoker, but I feel I need to take a stand. The tagline at the end of the commercials implies that they are being aired by New York State, and if that is true this is an egregious waste of tax dollars. Everyday the newspapers are filled with articles about subway lines having to be cut, schools closed, hospitals being shut down, bridges in imminent danger of collapsing into rivers and on and on. I think the tax money raised from selling cigarettes should be put toward these causes, rather than on commercials designed to make citizens sick to their stomach.

The last time I checked, cigarettes were still a legal product, and were being sold in most supermarkets. Quite frankly, if cigarettes are that lethal then New York should take bold step of outlawing their sale altogether. We know that won’t happen anytime soon because the city and state are the ones making the real killing off of the tax dollars that these products raise.