Just wait until Tony Soprano hears about this!
Posted on 07/25/2005 4:38:43 AM PDT by jeepgal
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - Ashtrays have been disappearing in cars like fins on Cadillacs, and so could smoking while driving in New Jersey, under a measure introduced in the Legislature.
Although the measure faces long odds, it still has smokers incensed and arguing it's a Big Brother intrusion that threatens to take away one of the few places they can enjoy their habit. "The day a politician wants to tell me I can't smoke in my car, that's the day he takes over my lease payments," said John Cito, a financial planner from Hackensack with a taste for $20 US cigars.
Those cigars, pipes and cigarettes would become no-nos for drivers. Offenders would be stung with a fine of up to $250, under the measure, whose sponsor said it's designed more to improve highway safety than protect health.
Some states, including New Jersey, have considered putting the brakes on smoking while children are in the car. But none have gone for an outright ban on smoking while driving, according to Washington, D.C.-based Action on Smoking and Health, the country's oldest anti-tobacco organization.
Smokers, feeling like easy targets, say enough already. They argue they've been forced outside office buildings, run off the grounds of public facilities, and asked to pony up more in per-pack excise taxes when states feel a budget squeeze.
"With smoking, it's becoming increasingly fashionable to target legislation or prohibitions," said George Koodray, a member of the Metropolitan Cigar Society, a 100-strong group that meets in Paterson for dinner and a smoke.
Assemblyman John McKeon, a tobacco opponent whose father died of emphysema, sponsored the legislation. He cites a AAA-sponsored study on driver distractions in which the automobile association found that of 32,000 accidents linked to distraction, one per cent were related to smoking.
The measure, co-sponsored by Assemblywoman Lorretta Weinberg, a fellow Democrat, was introduced last month just before legislators' summer break. It faces some improbable odds for passing.
Some legislators may fear the bill is frivolous compared with more pressing issues like taxes, said political analyst David Rebovich.
And there's this to consider: Traffic safety groups acknowledge motorists now widely ignore the state's year-old law against using hand-held cellphones, so why would smoking be any different?
Mitchell Sklar, of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, said police departments may balk at enforcing such a law. "In general, we'd rather not try to incrementally look at every single behaviour and make those a violation," he said.
Interesting how it is always the more 'progressive' states that are first with busy-body type legislation. I guess they've already solved all the serious problems.
ping
libertarian ping
They will eventually run out of things to control.
Have you been to NJ? puke!!!
Something like this reminds you how much free time politicians have to even think this crap up....
In the good ole days being a politician was a part time job supplemented by your full time job of probably farming.
How it became a perkapalozza is beyond me. I guess we the taxpayer in the end allowed it to happen and allow it to continue unchecked and rarely make a peep when your taxes are raised year after year.
Just wait until Tony Soprano hears about this!
This is the genesis of this legislation. The Do-Gooders were trying to eliminate smoking with children in the car, but found that it was impossible to do so, because how can something be legal with no kids in the car, but illegal with kids in the car? There was no way to rationally draft the legislation.
So, that leaves the Do-Gooder busybody with two options. He can either drop the whole matter or ban the entire class of activity, in order to ban the 5% of the activity he really cares about. Well, you really don't have to wonder which of those paths he will take. Bad ideas have a life of their own.
Perhaps, they should ban children from cars as they are a bigger distraction while driving than a smoke.
And yet they'll be the first to accuse us of "legislating morality".
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
From the AAA Study:
The study found that drivers were most often distracted by something outside their vehicle (29.4 percent) followed by adjusting a radio or CD player (11.4 percent). Other specific distractions included talking with other occupants (10.9 percent), adjusting vehicle or climate controls (2.8 percent), eating or drinking (1.7 percent), cell-phone use (1.5 percent) and smoking (0.9 percent).
Truer words were never spoken.
Some enterprising reporter needs to do a New Jersey Dept of Public Safety check on the driving records of Assemblymen McKeon and Weinberg. Surely these anti-smoking fanatics' driving histories are pristine (ticket & collision-free) before they would have the gall to try to bully their constituents into "safer driving" by outlawing distractions, no? And if the good assemblymen's records are pure as the driven snow, why stop there: no changing cd's, no eating,no dogs, no lipstick applying, no talking to the kids in the back,no reading billboards, and last but not least, no laughing at the absurd antics of little fascist wannabes who have nothing better to do with their time than try to cram their prissy puritanical ideas down their fellow citizens' throats.
Time for all good men to push back on these busybodies!
So, if they can eliminate pretty girls by the roadside and car radios, they can reduce distraction accidents by 40.8%!
I drive in NJ, and nobody pays any attention to the cell phone ban. In fact, nobody pays any attention to any traffic regulation. We're all just playing "Ticket Lotto", where all cars drive 80 mph and everybody is doing whatever they want in the car. If you are stopped, you get hit with fines and insurance surcharges that can amount to about $5000. Since the penalties are so severe, the police can't stop anybody. If NJ stopped a reasonable proportion of drivers who were violating the law, no politician would ever be re-elected to anything.
The typical response from Trenton is to rachet up the penalties even higher. But if getting popped for $5000 for speeding is not enough of a deterrent, will $10,000 do the job?
Misquote alert...I am sure the NJ cop didn't say "behaviour". Won't these Canucks quote us in our own idiom?
Sounds like a winner to me! /s
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