It was not often that I mentioned the 'Terminator of Pleasure' in Thought for the Day. Being set in the midst of news and current affairs, it was usually surrounded by enough doom and gloom for any one day, and I usually tried to keep it light and hopeful where I could. But here is a ray of hope in the way that society's attitude to smoking has changed over the last ten years. You see, some things do change for the better.

Once again the question of young people and their abuse of illegal drugs is in the news, but with familiarity breeding contempt, the story has been fairly low on the newslists. No high profile, rave dancing, ecstasy death to appall an older generation here, no shocked self-righteous demonization of drug barons making fortunes peddling death to our children, just the Royal College of Physicians doing their best to shout a warning against a drug that will bring a slow and lingering death to millions of our population.

Every day in the United Kingdom about 300 people die from smoking related diseases. Of smokers who began in their teens, it will account for the deaths of one in two, and half of those will end up losing more than twenty years of their lives, having paid huge sums of money for the privilege, personally to the cigarette manufacturers, and communally to finance the healthcare system that ends up treating them.

Tobacco smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the UK. Yet smoking amongst schoolkids has reached its highest level for ten years. By the time they leave school, a quarter of our sons and a third of our daughters are addicted to tobacco. What's the point of their education if they aren't even being taught how to survive?

Of course, selling cigarettes to children is illegal, but we hear no uproar in Westminster about punishing the perpetrators. Perhaps the situation should be looked at by the new group being set up to combat organised crime, though it seems unlikely, when the illegal trade is worth 100 million pounds of tax a year to the Treasury. More likely to hear of the rights of tobacco companies to fund education, sponsor sports, and advertise.

But Muhammad said "Your body has rights over you".

"On the Day of Judgment, no step of a servant of God shall slip until he has answered concerning four things; his body and how he used it; his life and how he spent it; his wealth and how he earned it; and his knowledge and what he did with it."

And for a warning against the dangers of self-abuse and self-indulgence, he suggested we "Remember often the Terminator of Pleasure".