Fortunately, I've managed to avoid them...until now.

About a week ago, I picked up a carton of Salem 100s, and immediately noticed that they not only tasted different, but tended to go out for no apparent reason. And I also noticed that I was feeling generally lousy within a day or two of opening the first pack. I figured that I just got a carton that had spent a little too much time in a hot warehouse or on a hot truck someplace, and that between work and family stuff, I was just feeling stressed and tired. I contented myself with the thoughts that I'd likely get a better carton after this one ran out, and that I just needed a little rest.

But then I checked the manufacturing stamps on the carton and packs, and noticed that the serial numbers differed from the format that I was used to seeing. These now had a "FSC" prefix, and after a little Googling, I discovered that RJR had already switched over all of it's brands to FSCs. It would also seem that FSCs will be the only type of cigarettes available from both PM and RJR across North America within the next year!

And after spending the last few hours reading all of the various comments and accounts of people getting sick due to the altered chemical composition of FSCs, I'm left with an awful and inescapable conclusion - unless a new manufacturing process is established, once FSCs are the only cigarettes available, I'm not going to be able to smoke commercially available brands of cigarettes anymore, which means that I am almost certainly going to quit smoking.

The only hope that I cling to is that a sufficient number of people will either quit smoking, or a sufficiently strong black market influence will assert itself, and tax revenues from the sale of cigarettes will fall dramatically, and state and federal governments will refine or repeal the FSC mandates and/or current manufacturing processes.