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Posted on 09/13/2002 5:48:43 AM PDT by Lizard_King

The Puritans They make me wanna smoke

New York City's Joseph Cherner is on a roll. The longtime head of SmokeFree Educational Services, he has just achieved perhaps the apex of his career. It looks highly likely that, because of Mayor Bloomberg's enthusiastic support, almost all public smoking of tobacco will soon be banned in New York City. That means bars, dance-clubs, separately ventilated areas in restaurants, and even outdoor street cafes. This new initiative, backed up by another whopping increase in the cigarette tax, will once and for all condemn smoking to those kinds of illicit and shameful activities that one can only engage in in private. And Mr Cherner is ecstatic.

The New York Times' reporter Andrew Jacobs recently reported Mr Cherner's words of triumph: "All truth goes through three stages," Cherner proclaimed. "It's ridiculed, then violently opposed and then accepted as self-evident." The truth in question? Ah, there's the rub. That cigarette smoking is unhealthy? Hardly. Everyone has known that for years. That second-hand cigarette smoke is a nuisance? Again, no one doubts that either, although the specific harm done by second-hand smoke is still a highly contentious subject. That nicotine is addictive? Er, no one questions that assertion either. No, the truth that Mr Cherner is really pursuing is an old and simple one: smoking is morally wrong (it harms yourself and others) and the government has a duty to try and stamp it out.

American puritanism - never absent but cyclically waxing and waning - is back again. It's one of those features of American culture that has flourished from the very beginning, when the continent was re-booted by a bunch of unpleasant, uptight, do-gooders from England. Why, just this week, within sight of the place where the Pilgrims first landed, on the Eastern most tip of Cape Cod, a park ranger was wading through marsh and walking through half a mile of sand-dunes to present tickets to a handful of distant sun-bathers who had just taken their bathing suits off. Somehow, I think those seventeenth-century anabaptists would have approved.

The ban on smoking, of course, is dressed up in the mantle of public health. This is asserted with a straight face, as if smoking is not a choice, as if its consequences are unknown, as if grown-ups cannot make decisions about their own lives for themselves. Milder, more sensible measures - like allowing some bars to go smoke-free and others to stay nicotined, so that the drinking public can have an actual choice - have been swept aside by the zeal of the anti-smokers. It's not enough merely to segregate smokers any more. They have to be extirpated from the public domain. It figures, I suppose. This is a country that still locks away hundreds of thousands for cannabis-related offenses. It's a country that has recently tried, in some localities, to designate clubbers' glow-sticks as drug paraphernalia in order to shut down rave parties. It's a country where even the journalists barely touch the bottle. And certainly never in working hours.

It seems, alas, as if sometimes the chaotic freedom of America can only be maintained by incessant bouts of panic and puritanism. McDonalds, we learned last week, is now cutting down on the fat in its fries. Not that you can easily switch to fat-and-guilt-free pasta any more either. Having spent decades telling Americans not to eat fat, the dietary puritans are now arguing that carbohydrates are the real evil. American women, beset by all this, were further side-swiped earlier this summer by yet another media campaign against post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy. It turned out that a minuscule increased risks of some sorts of cancer had been detected. The idea that millions of women might feel better, sexier, and happier for many years of their post-menopausal life doesn't count against the scolds telling them the therapy might, conceivably, one day, eventually make them sick. And just for good measure, the doctors subsequently weighed in against wilting men using testosterone replacement therapy as well. Tut tut, guys. You're not supposed to be feeling that good.

Mr Cherner is therefore a classic American type. He has no personal issue with smoking. But he got extremely rich in the bond markets and decided to use his money to advance a cause. According to the Times, "except for a housekeeper who died of lung cancer, [Cherner] never had a firsthand brush with the uglier side of smoking. In fact, the cause was chosen somewhat at random, he said. A childhood comic book habit left him with a superhero's mind-set about good versus evil. "To me it was the classic comic book fight," he said. "One side had all the morality and the other had all the money."" Well, actually, he had all the money, and some poor schmuck trying to smoke a cigarette in his favorite Bronx bar is on the receiving end of Mr Cherner's morality. To give you an idea of what has already been done to the average nicotine addict, the city tax on a packet of cigarettes just went from 8 cents a pack to $1.50 in a single day.

You'd think that some liberal New Yorkers might come to the defense of the down-trodden smoker, especially since he or she is often poorer than the non-smoker, has fewer opportunities for quick and easy pleasure, and already has to pay a hugely regressive tax just to light up. But no. Even the usually big-hearted editorialist for the New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg, weighed in on the Puritan side of the debate last week. "Maybe the real reason smokers don't do more to resist the indignities society heaps upon them - the taxes, the sidewalk banishments, the reproaches - is that they're secretly grateful," opined the New Yorker. "As anyone who has ever been or known one can attest, a smoker is simply a person who would like to quit smoking. In their cups, even the hardest of the hard core - Fleet Street hacks, French academics, truck-stop waitresses, plainclothes cops - will admit that they'd just as soon be free of their addiction." So not only do New Yorkers have to pay far far more, not only can they not even light up in a bar or a sidewalk cafe, they're supposed to be grateful for this latest piece of oppression! I know of one authentic New York response to this attitude but it cannot, alas, be printed in a family newspaper.

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