About

Welcome to our about page. Instead of making this page about the three of us, who made this site, we'd rather make it about all of us.

Steadily, smokers are becoming a minority, with almost no rights throughout the western world. Instead of coping with other, more important problems, society is dealing with smoking. There are still places where we, the smokers, can enjoy our habit, bad as it is, but the number of places where smoking is allowed is shrinking exponentially. To be fair, we do understand many people don't like having smokers around and we respect that. However, we're always against strong government intervention. It's easy to understand every restaurant or cafe must have smoking and non-smoking sections, but banning smoking completely doesn't make much sense. Let's say a smoker owns a restaurant, why on Earth wouldn't they allow smoking in their own venue? That's ridiculous! Paying a premium tax in such cases would certainly prove beneficial for the country's budget. Why hasn't something like this been allowed?

It's a tricky question and, to be fair, the tobacco industry had its "dark moments" in the past. But times are changing and some people will keep smoking, even though they are aware of the consequences. Why treat them like second grade citizens?

We are here to try to stop that. As smokers, we also have rights, and while we don't want to endanger other people's health, we do want to smoke. That should be our right. Simply allowing smoking at selected places would do the trick. But please, don't make these places look like ghettos!

At the moment, many of the European countries are facing tough challenges to compete in the global market. So, what do governments facing reforms do? They ban smoking! Italy was the first EU country to do so and if you've read the news, you can certainly conclude that the smoking issue is far from their priority issues, like the mafia accounting for 6-7 percent of their GDP (please note we don't have anything against Italy, just using their situation as an example).

This is an opportunity to share our story with you and tell you what Smokeen.com is all about. We'll be updating our website regularly with all things related to smoking — quitting included — adding our two cents to every article. If you're a smoker, you'll love this site, or at least, we hope so. Heck, even if you're not, we hope you'll get a chance to see things from our angle.

We'd like to hear your thoughts. Please don't hesitate to send us your feedback.

Smokeen.com is a work of three people:

• Dusan Belic - a long time Internet entrepreneur and an avid smoker
• Vladimir Petkovic - engineer with strong web development skills, and
• Dragan Stefanov - social networking expert

We hope the three of us will create an ultimate destination for all smokers around the world. Stay tuned as we rant about smoking every day.

Images on the right are from sexy_candid_smokers Flickr set.

Sincerely yours,
Dusan, Vladimir and Dragan