” I have never smoked, nor do I ever intend to, but I’ve known too many ehrliche yidden who do to be able to dismiss it out of hand as some sort of aveirah.”
Avirah – you contrived this whole post just because of the emotional trigger I copied above. While it is very important to assume ehrliche yidden have reasons for doing things that many have deemed wrong, creating a dissertation on it may be overkill. Your information is off and forced. Better you should have simply posted the above line, and moved on.