Sanctimonious Smoking Nanny

Apparently, the Denver City Council is never too busy to intercede with some good old-fashioned social engineering. And soon enough, smoking in restaurants and bars will be banned.

It's enough to make a holier-than-thou politician - with pristine pink lungs - shriek with delight.

Jeanne Faatz, at this point, is the lone voice of reason on the council. She still believes in trivial things like free enterprise and property rights.

She's sort of an outsider. And although she won't admit it on record, I'm certain the other council members put shaving cream in her shoes, lock her out of meetings and blow spitballs at her.

Don't misunderstand me. Faatz hates smoking. She detests the habit so strongly that she can't stop complaining about it - it causes her to be hoarse and sneeze and makes her stomach coil. She hates being put in this position, protecting smokers.

But Faatz, in contrast to the missionaries of healthful living, appreciates that the ban is not a smoking issue but a matter of freedom.

Faatz loathes sitting next to a smoker in a restaurant. Who doesn't? But she does something extremely peculiar: She gets up, walks out and finds an establishment where she doesn't have to.

"My decision comes from the fact that you have private ownership in business, and they should have the right to target whatever customers they feel the marketplace will give them," she explains. "If, indeed, nobody frequented a smoking establishment, I say, 'Right on, the marketplace has spoken."'

Faatz believes choices and decisions are key in a free society. It's expedient to say, "Yuck, I don't like smoke." But ask yourself this: Do you think government should dictate how a person runs a business? What about customers? Should they be allowed to decide whether they want an all-smoking restaurant or a nonsmoking restaurant?

What if the Denver City Council concluded that cellphones at work should be banned because they have been linked to brain tumors?

Are there justifiable reasons for intervention? Sure. If there is contaminated food or other hidden health issues, government must protect citizens. Full disclosure is imperative. But when the sign in front of a steakhouse reads "smoking allowed," adults should be able to make their own decisions.

Besides, a steady diet of steaks wrapped with bacon is probably apt to kill you a lot faster than secondhand smoke.

We all know what's next. "What about those unfortunate, powerless, coughing employees?" The logical answer given by Faatz is simply that "it is a person's choice where they work." Who is forcing you to work in a smoke-filled diner?

But for the moment, let's advance the argument further: If everyone with a risky job should be protected from all hazards, where would we end up?

You realize the stress a stockbroker goes through? What about the stress a cop experiences? Yes, stress kills far more people than the wildly overstated threat of secondhand smoke. And who can deny the dangers of being a bike messenger, a cabbie or a firefighter?

Smoke Free Denver, another group of sanctimonious nanny types, wants to sabotage freedom for smokers and property owners "to protect the health of Denver residents, workers and visitors from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke."

Well, what about the claims of tens of thousands of deaths due to secondhand smoke?

It's junk science. The University of Chicago's Dr. John Bailar, a critic of the tobacco industry, has produced a detailed analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine debunking the supposed link between secondhand smoke and heart disease. His study is one of many.

But if you don't believe them, there are long lists of smoke-free establishments for you to go to. Enjoy.

David Harsanyi's column appears Monday and Thursday. He can be reached at 303-820-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.

The list of good-byes is infinite if smell is the problem.

These people that complain about being "FORCED" to breathe tobacco smoke remind me of the types of people that move near an airport or train tracks and complain about the noise.

They are no more "FORCED" to be exposed to tobacco smoke than anyone was "FORCED" to move next to the airport or tracks.

There is a chicken farm diagonally across from me.......I would no more complain about the 150,000+ chickens there, or the trucks that bring them in and then remove them, than I would complain about pollen causing me to sneeze in the spring.

I have no choice in the pollen situation, but if I didn't want to be bothered by chickens or trucks, I shouldn't have moved near a chicken farm. Being exposed to tobacco smoke in private businesses is the same as my living across from a chicken farm.

Being exposed to it out on the street is similar to the pollen, but they brought it upon themselves, by kicking smokers out of private businesses.

ROFLMPJO!!!!!

One of the more vocal restaurant/bar owners opposing the smoking ban in Delaware was someone who had turned his establishment into a smoke-free place. He was fighting the ban because he didn't want the state taking away his market niche.

That's what these gnatzies refuse to acknowlege - they are hurting the businesses that already cater to them by insisted ALL cater to them, even the ones they will never enter.

I was absolutely incensed by one of the ban addicts who, after the ban went into effect, refused to go have a beer with me to show the bar owner of a local establishment that they meant what they were saying that the non-smokers would flock to all places because of the ban. He declined my invitation because he "never goes into bars" because he doesn't drink or approve of drinking alcohol.

As much as I despise anti-smokers, those that choose to lie, as this person did, are even lower on my list......not that getting lower than a snakes belly is an easy thing to do.

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RUSH: All right, now this nicotine business. What did I do with the nicotine story? Oh, come on. Hang on, folks, here just... Yes, yes. Well, nicotine is supposed to help Alzheimer's. Nicotine supposedly helps all kinds of diseases associated with schizophrenia, and what people are actually doing out there, the story said people who smoke or whatever taking nicotine to self-medicate themselves, and yet what are we doing? We're in the process -- no, that's one way you can look at this. That nicotine calms the disorders associated with schizophrenia and depression (story) and this sort of thing. Well, smoking, thus, by some people's interpretation, may be a way of self-medicating for people who are depressive or who are schizo. Which - now, carry this out. This brings up a whole new way of discriminating against smokers. Can you just see somebody quietly not hiring a person because they smelled of cigarette smoke and in making the leap that they are, in addition to being filthy, that they are mentally unstable?

I didn't touch on this yesterday but here comes this news that the people who use nicotine a lot are doing it, and they don't know why. It's a drug, but they're calming their otherwise tendencies to be schizo. OK, so this news gets out. We've got a new form of discrimination against smokers. Now, if the nicotine keeps them from being schizo and yet we're doing everything we can to get as many people not to smoke that means we're going to take their nicotine away from them, then people who are self-medicating their schizo are going to end up being schizo, and they're going to show up for job interviews. They're going to come cross as schizo because the nicotine is not calming the schizo and they're not going to get hired because they're wacko. It's interesting to ponder the types of discrimination that can occur in this country.

So will the left, which is doing everything it can, and not just the left, but will the do-gooders and the nannies of the country who somehow believe that none of us can die if we live right. If we just do everything they say, we won't die. If they succeed in taking away nicotine and so forth, will they have sympathy for those who they've made rejoin their natural schizo tendencies? Or will they fight to have this injustice done away with and that is people being perceived as schizo just because they don't smoke or used to smoke or do smoke, no matter how you cut it. Now, nicotine. Forget all that for just a minute. Nicotine retards schizophrenia. What else do cigarette smokers almost always do? They drink coffee, right?

"Drinking coffee can make the mind go blank, according to new research from the UK. Caffeine widely held to make people more alert, can make the mind go blank or struggle to switch between trains of thought. It could help the brain process information rapidly but it interferes once the brain tries to switch between subjects, researchers claim. Volunteers were split into two groups, one give an 200 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of a couple cups of coffee. They then answered a hundred questions after reading ten priming words with between two and eight of the words sounding similar to the answer. Caffeine appeared to help participants find the correct answers with primed with many similar sounding words. But when they were more unrelated priming words, they suffered more tip-of-the-tongue moments than those who had not had coffee."

It's actually Italian research published in Behavioral Neuroscience. So we can't win. Coffee can make the mind go blank, but that's bad for you, so we shouldn't drink coffee. When your mind goes blank we're going to make you quit cigarettes; you're going to become a mindless schizophrenic -- and then to close the loop, "Scientists have found a genetic link to bad behavior." Uh, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes I think these scientists are in cahoots are trial lawyers. They do these studies that are never ending, funded we guess by government and all we end up is nobody is ever responsible for what they do. Now bad behavior is genetic. It could be related to the fact that you do or do not use nicotine, or coffee, but regardless, it's not your fault, so we can sue whoever it is that makes you do bad things. We can sue Big Tobacco. We can sue Big Coffee Bean. We can sue whoever because whatever you do is not under your control. We are robots, ladies and gentlemen, who do not do anything because of our own volition.

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