"This is as bad as it gets. Stage four lung cancer," the specialist told my dear friend.

The Russian Roulette of cancers. Some smokers puff away until old age and dodge the bullet. Others smoke for a few years and suffer, and suffer.

The image on the CT scan was confronting. It should normally be all black, but this one was speckled with white dots. All tumours.

In its ruthlessly efficient role as a network courier of healthy substances throughout the body the lymphatic system also has the sinister capacity to carry the bad stuff, everywhere.

They go through the stages of grief. What have they done to themselves? They resolve to fight it. They don't want anyone to know. They want to live, but if it gets too bad they might want to die.

And, all the time the dry, stabbing cough. The search for air. The constant shifting of the posture in a vain bid to maximise the access to air. The fear.

On average about 20 Australians every day succumb to lung cancer. The bad news usually arrives later in life in 80 per cent of cases, following years of blissful ignorance and indifference.

The baby boomers and all those before them lived through the most eloquent era of ignorance and indifference.

Cigars after dinner, inside restaurants. Pipes, roll-your-owns and brimming ashtrays; ashtrays tarted up as gifts; ones that you could spin like a top to clear/hide the ash and butts.

The passive effect on non-smokers was always a collateral pity. You had a right to smoke. They had every right to be somewhere else if they didn't like it.

The world back then smoked its head off. Smokes were an essential part of ration packs in the two world wars.

Men smoked because women watched the Marlboro cowboy on his horse, with customary fag stuck in the side of his mouth in those clever TV commercials, and wanted their man to look equally as manly.

Now you can't even smoke outdoors in some places. Taxes have pushed the price beyond the average battler but they'll still sacrifice to find the money.

A new generation has adjusted to the new restrictions, and you want to scruff each one of them and drag them over to meet your wheezing, gasping, coughing and scared dear friend.

What do you say to these sufferers? Tough gig? Better still, what do you say to someone with lung cancer who has never smoked? Maybe they passively smoked. Too bad.

I gave up 15 years ago. I can't imagine a life in constant search for air. They say the early stages of lung cancer is like spending all day with your head under a doona.

It gets progressively worse. Air supply and demand. The harder you try to breathe the harder it gets.

This is the point where you want to advocate a ban on cigarettes but you know the black market would beat the system.

The best governments can do is to keep raising the taxes and never apologise. Certainly hit tobacco companies with a steep carbon tax and force them to help clean up their mess and misery.

Even then we're on a hiding to nothing. Tobacco taxes raise about $9 billion a year nationally, but lung disease costs the nation almost $12 billion a year

The suggestion that higher tobacco taxes will only hurt those who can least afford the price hikes is so absurd to be beyond a joke. Taking personal responsibility for your health surely kicks in somewhere.