by Mat Churchill

One of my favourite jokes of all time is "Why do women wear makeup and perfume?" Answer: "Because they're ugly and they stink."

But I think you can turn this joke from being wildly humorous to a statement of fact if you replace the word 'women' with 'smokers' (and forget the makeup and perfume bit).

Smokers are ugly and they stink!

Why, you ask, is Mat launching a scathing attack on roughly 20% of the adult population? Because you're ruining the place, that's why!

To be fair, my tirade is being directed to the butt flickers who visit and live in our town. And not good butt flickers like you'll meet at the Ironbar at 2am on a Saturday night, the ones who discard their poisonous filters wherever the hell they feel like.

In Port Douglas today you can't walk more than a couple of metres without seeing other people's cancer sticks in gutters, gardens, footpaths, and our 'pristine' Four Mile Beach.

And what's worse is once you start seeing them you can't stop, and the more you look the more angry it makes you….well, me anyway.

Just yesterday as I was thinking about how to approach writing this article, a middle aged women in Macrossan Street launched a cigarette butt straight into the drain. I gave her what I thought was the mother of all evils, only to hear her tell her friend that she thought I was checking her out.

That leads me to my next point....Arrogance.

The sheer arrogance of butt flickers astounds me. They live perpetually in 1945 (when half the adult population smoked) and think they're too cool for school as they take their last gasp, and with squinty little eyes launch their butts through thumb and forefinger.

Then, if you happen to summon the courage to point them to the nearest bin, they'll look at you like you've just bashed their Nana.

I can see what's going through their heads, "it's only a tiny cigarette butt, what does it matter?" How about me and 1,000 mates come to your place everyday and chuck a handful of the stinkers on your front door step?  All I need now is some friends (blatant sympathy grab).

In the end though it's not our gutters, gardens, or footpaths I care about. The trouble is where it all ends up, out on the beach and in the ocean which contributes so much to why we're here in the first place.

Imagine you're tucking into a great big juicy steak only to realise it's actually someone's broken thong (and not the good type of broken thong you'd see at the Ironbar at 2am…..never mind). But it's too late, you're already half way finished.

I reckon that'd be a pretty close resemblance of what our turtles and other marine life have to put up with everyday.

So what to do about it?

We've got an amazing local organisation in Tangaroa Blue whose volunteers, and a number of other concerned residents, who are doing their best to clean up after the BF's, but the sheer number makes the task impossible to get on top of.

Do we really want our beaches and Coral Sea to resemble some South East Asian tourist areas like Ko Samui (they say there are more butts on the beach than stars in the sky)?

Do we introduce a law that says smokers can discard their cigarette butts wherever they like, as long as they stub them out on themselves first?

Or maybe a touch less sadistic, ban smoking outside designated areas like the smoking rooms you see in airports? How good do they look!

How do we stop people trashing everything that's good about this area? Over to you.