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Posted on 10/01/2002 9:39:56 PM PDT by Just another Joe
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. You go there by choice.
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.
You know they're going to try for it sooner or later unless they are stopped HARD first.
I see in our future a renewed interest in private clubs.
Sympathetic (crooked) guards and top cons run the system, not wardens and politicians.
Here are just a few stories from around the country:
Smuggling Increases In Prison Where Smoking Banned
Scroll to:No Smoking in Prison Creates New Smuggling Problem
Archived Entry: Prisoners go on strike in Maryland
As Smokefree Prison Laws Increase Nationally, Some Problems Emerge
Ping.........
Saving this clever phrase for future use.
Of course not, like illegal drugs, the prisoners gets what they want including cigerettes, why bother rioting.
My wife works in a hospital, where smoking, of course, has long since been forbidden. She does not smoke, and never has.
Anyway, one of the girls in her office said, "Pat, could you not use that hand lotion anymore. The smell of it gives me a headache."
What the anti-smoking crusade has always been about is not health, but the assertion of a self-entitled pinhead that he is not to be inconvenienced by having to deal with his fellow man.
If I had to have metastatic lung cancer in order to return this country to a constitutional republic, would I?
I like to think so but you just never know until the situation arises.
IMO, yes, Big, Intrusive, Tell everyone how to live AND die government IS worse than metastatic lung cancer.
Never had it so I can't make a valid comparison but in the case of metastatic lung cancer it only affects one person for the worse. In the other case it affects EVERYONE for the worse.
Those are the ones.
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