Posted on 06/29/2003 3:27:38 PM PDT by Just another Joe
Fayetteville Considers Snuffing Out Cigarettes
In Fayetteville, where a fair portion of the people want to legalize marijuana, we're talking about banning cigarette smoking.
How many townsfolk favor both legalizing the herb and banning the leaf, I wonder.
The smoking ban proposal comes before the city council on July 15. The idea is to remove exemptions from a 1991 ordinance that allow smoking in offices, bars, restaurants, pool halls, beauty salons, barber shops, roller rinks, bowling alleys and retail stores.
The issue's importance goes far beyond the city limits.
Fayetteville still has the biggest share of dining in Northwest Arkansas. It certainly has a large portion of the region's bars. Benton County may be the wettest dry county in Arkansas with all its private club permits, but it's still a dry county.
More important, backers of the ban hope the idea will catch on in other cities if it passes here. Their hopes are reasonable.
Long ago an experienced Fayetteville politician told me that Northwest Arkansas was the state's trendy West Coast. Things that become national trends start in California and go across the United States. Things that become statewide trends start in the Northwest and go across Arkansas, he said.
The California analogy may be more apt than he intended, but it's apt. If Arkansas was a tent, Fayetteville would be a big, felt arrow stitched onto it, pointing to a loose edge and emblazoned with the lettering: "Camels: Stick Noses Here."
It should also be mentioned that similar smoking bans are being offered all over the country. Denver, Colo., and San Antonio, Texas are two other towns that have similar bans pending before their city councils.
I don't smoke. I don't go to bars. I don't enjoy breathing other people's fumes.
I still don't like the ban idea.
If I owned a restaurant or a bar, it would be my place. I wouldn't want other people telling my customers what they can't do in my place, especially if what they're doing is legal in most other places. Imagine the Vichy French government enforcing a smoking ban on Rick's Cafe Americain in "Casablanca," and you'll have a rough idea of my gut-level reaction.
I realize that the right of somebody to swing their fist stops at the end of my nose. I realize the same argument could be made that somebody's right to blow smoke into the air ends at my nostrils. However, I also realize that this portion of the country is getting more crowded every day. If we keep making laws that insist that nobody ever imposes upon anybody else, it's going to be tough to preserve anybody's right to do anything.
The waiters and waitresses who have to breathe the stuff have a right to complain. Other than that, the public health arguments don't sway me. My life and health are threatened more each day by a few nuts on College Avenue who don't think red lights apply to them than it is by all the second-hand smoke in Arkansas. Anybody want to propose a partial driving ban?
I cannot recall ever going to a restaurant and deciding never to go back because it was too smoky.
The idea of guarding the health of people by giving them clear air in which to eat chicken-fried steak and down jolts of liquor is absurd. The intent of this law is to make smoking socially unacceptable.
Folks, smokers already know that what they do is socially unacceptable. They are barraged by anti-smoking ads. They are deluged by information on how bad smoking is. Their kids come home from anti-smoking sessions at school and nag. The large majority of smokers would quit if nicotine weren't so addictive. Several restaurants in town have already gone smokeless without being prodded by the city.
Keven Anderson, a state representative from Rogers, has a pretty good rule. Every time a proposed law comes before him, he asks himself a question: Is this what government was set up for?
Somehow, I don't think a bunch of Southern tobacco planters got together with their Yankee trader brethren in Philadelphia in 1787 to found a government to nag people for smoking.
That's fine and dandy and I tend to believe you.
However, you let that camel's nose inside the tent and pretty soon you're dealing with camel dung inside the tent.
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