Smoking's bad, big government is even worse

In 1998, responding to the anti-smoking ethos and activists' insistence on working to forbid smoking everywhere, Mayor Thomas M. Menino proposed a compromise on smoking in Boston eateries. Smoking would be OK in bars, but restaurants required a non-smoking section.

Everybody got something out of this. Smokers weren't cast out into the streets from their favorite saloons, and anti-smokers sensed an incipient victory and got something for their pains.

The anti-smoking crusade has gained steam and now the mayor, having bought into the argument of those who believe the case against second-hand smoke is air-tight, wants an outright, total ban against smoking in bars and restaurants.

But like ``global warming,'' which many scientists deny exists, second-hand smoke's ``dangers'' are disputed by experts. Anyhow, it's a thin reed on which to hang the mayor's desired total ban.

Somebody might propose banning smoking in prisons, though jail is like Robert Frost's definition of home: ``When you have to go there, they have to take you in.'' But nobody has to be a customer or work at Restaurant A or Bar B, any more than a person must be a fisherman, cab driver, firefighter or cop, the four most dangerous jobs.

Even if second-hand smoke is dangerous, as the hysterics insist - scientific studies have by no means decided this unequivocally - nobody must patronize or labor at a bar or restaurant.

More importantly, the war on smokers is a war on freedom, maybe not your type of freedom, but freedom is indivisible, and ``indivisible'' is a crucial word about our nation in the Pledge of Allegiance.

If that seems hyperbolic, consider the extent to which Big Brother has intruded on our liberties. The right of association is more or less kaput; try to hire or fire at will without some know-it-all and mightily powerful agency dashing in to rip you asunder. The right to put your child into the nearest school has been yanked from you in many big cities, to no purpose but to please avatars of all-intrusive government. Spend the day writing down the ways in which government has maneuvered successfully to limit your freedoms, and smoke will billow from your ears.

A free society should tell restaurateurs and bar owners: do as you will, announce your policy, let the free market make you or break you. Obsessed anti-smoking types will go to smoke-free places, habitual smokers will go only where puffing's welcome, and folks who aren't in a tizzy about this one way or the other will go where they please and abide by the rules of the house.

Speaking of houses, I tried on radio the other night to get state Public Health Commissioner Howard Koh to tell us when he'll demand that people be forbidden to smoke in their own homes. Dr. Koh went into what I guess is his standard riff about how devoted he is to protecting everybody's health (yada, yada, yada), but I heard no persuasive commitment to stay out of our domiciles.

Meanwhile, the anti-smoker absolutists move in for the kill. Defenders of the citizenry's liberties ought to be combating this latest bit of mock-medicinal quackery and outright authoritarianism. Smoking may not be good for you, but Big Government is worse.

David Brudnoy teaches journalism at Boston University, hosts a WBZ Radio talk show and is a Community Newspaper Company film critic.

More silliness......
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48763-2002Oct5.html

Canada Hopes Photos Will Coax Smokers To Kick the Habit Graphic Images Put on Cigarette Packs

_____News From Canada_____

• Americas' Life Expectancy Rises, but Health Mixed (The Washington Post, Sep 23, 2002)

Tobacco

By Richard Pretorius
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 6, 2002; Page A30

WINNIPEG, Manitoba -- Before Tony Hayden smokes a cigarette, he takes two other hits -- one to his wallet, the other to his conscience. Rising federal and provincial taxes have helped push the price of cigarettes up nearly 40 percent here in the past year, to the equivalent of up to $7.50 a pack. Hayden, a plumber, said he can still afford his $50-to-$70-a-week habit, but the cost is cutting into his weekend spending money.

More troubling to him are what he calls the "sick but powerful" warning images that began to appear on cigarette packs in Canada 20 months ago. The 16 government-approved pictures, one of which must be on every pack, include a man in a hospital bed breathing through a ventilator, a close-up of yellowing, nicotine-stained teeth, two boys staring out from the written message "Don't Poison Us" and a pair of lungs blackened with cancer.

"They make you think, and sometimes I do a double take," Hayden said as he and a colleague, Adam Lavoie, took an afternoon smoking break last month.

The picture warnings -- the first of their kind, with Brazil since adopting them as well -- are part of the Canadian government's expanding campaign against smoking. It includes $320 million over a five-year period for education and prevention.

The pictures have also caught the attention of U.S. lawmakers. A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would require similar pictures on the packaging of cigarettes sold in the United States. But a spokesman for Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah), one of the bill's sponsors, said the legislation probably is on the "deep back burner."

The Canadian government expects to spend years fighting legal challenges to the warning requirement. Last month, a Montreal court heard closing arguments in a lawsuit filed by tobacco companies claiming that the regulations, including the required warnings, infringe on their rights of free expression.

"We say the package is a vehicle of expression and insisting on putting these images on, which vilify the product," violates the industry's rights, said Simon V. Potter, lead counsel for the tobacco companies in the suit.

He said that Canada's tobacco industry is "quite happy" to include written health warnings on the packages, but that the pictures and the accompanying text take up too much space and are "unjustifiable."

Mark Taylor, immediate past president of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, said the companies "are facing an uphill battle." "It took the tenacity of a number of public health groups and some very brave politicians who stood up to the tobacco industry to get this through," he said. The pictures "inform people of the true risks involved in smoking. They don't exaggerate the dangers."

Anti-smoking activists and health officials credit the picture warnings with helping to reduce smoking. An estimated 600,000 Canadians quit in 2001, leaving about 5.4 million smokers over age 15 in a country where 45,000 people die annually from smoking-related causes.

"Earlier studies have shown that the warnings have been effective," said Ken Kyle, director of public issues at the Canadian Cancer Society, which in March surveyed 2,014 Canadians and found that 76 percent support the graphic warnings, with 59 percent of smokers saying they were a good idea.

In a previous study by the society, 43 percent of smokers said the new warnings had made them more concerned about the health effects of smoking, while 44 percent said the warnings increased their motivation to quit.

Kyle pointed out that the warning labels are only one part of the country's campaign and that continuing to increase taxes on tobacco products will have as much impact as anything else. Lavoie, an apprentice plumber, said that if prices keep going up, he will consider quitting.

Lavoie said that after his initial shock, most of the warnings have not greatly affected him. Yet he and Hayden said they avoid buying packs that display the stained teeth, or a bent cigarette meant to link smoking and impotence. "Those are the worst," Hayden said, joking that if he did not smoke, he could afford to take summers off.

To nonsmoker Julie Snee, who works in the administrative offices of West Edmonton Mall, the world's largest indoor shopping complex, the warnings are good if they get people's attention, but she is a bit skeptical about their effect. "I have friends who smoke and they don't seem to be quitting," she said.

Health officials were prepared for changing attitudes as people got used to the new packages. "Of course, there is a wear-out factor, and we will change the pictures over time," said Murray Kaiserman, director of research for the tobacco control program of Health Canada, the federal government's health agency. "The labels are a source of information. They cannot be avoided."

Some smokers have tried to do just that, however, as a small industry selling decorative covers for the packs has been born since the pictures first appeared.

"If someone is spending money to avoid a message, then they are obviously aware the message is there, and it still has an effect," Taylor, the physician, said.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.