Battling the new prohibitionists
Crusade against smoking wrong
By Ryan Merryman
Opinion Editor
March 01, 2005
If you smoke, you’ve heard it all before. Strangers walking up to you to tell you your smoking, a good thirty feet away, offends them. Amateur doctors handing out medical diagnoses as to what your lungs look like. Even better, you can read the daily musings of health professionals, government officials and every chipper volunteer trying to cure you of the demons of nicotine addiction.
It’s enough to make one switch to non-filtered.
Keep in mind – and everyone who writes even a mild defense of smoking must utter this magic phrase – I am not encouraging others to smoke. Indeed, I am not downplaying the health risks, since, after all, anyone who can read since the Surgeon General’s warning appeared has known that breathing in smoke is fairly hazardous to your health.
But, with all that being said, I refuse to feel sorry for engaging in a habit enjoyed by almost a third of my peers at this University, is completely legal and, quite frankly, enjoyable.
Smoking, be it cigarettes, pipes or cigars (although due to the culture of wealth associated with the latter two, they have mostly escaped public umbrage), has become the most bitterly resented public use of a controlled substance in America.
Whereas alcohol used to draw the ire of the religious and moralistic zealots who spearheaded the Prohibition movement, smoking, especially of cigarettes, has become public enemy number one of the descendants of those who tried, literally, to poison the well of enjoyable intoxication.
Many of you reading this will simply shrug off what I have written as that of the product of an angry smoker who has seen his right to smoke eclipsed by a government eager to appease a skittish and frightened mob of middle class prohibitionists and public health zealots. Be that as it may, and certainly this goes beyond my usual academic civil libertarian beliefs, just remember that after the government manages to bankrupt the tobacco companies and drive tobacco smoking underground, they’ll be going after your favorite bad habits.
No, the battle over smoking goes far beyond whether it is legal for me to light up in a bar or have an after dinner cigar at a restaurant – it is about the freedom of choice for the owner of a private establishment and the customers who choose to patronize it to decide what dangers they are willing to face in their lives.
Perhaps it isn’t even about smoking, with the dangers of cigarettes being used as a mere screen for yet more government intrusion into our lives. After all, according to Eric Schlosser’s “Reefer Madness,” the government already succeeded in demonizing cocaine and marijuana around the turn of the previous century, despite their common use as medicinal and recreational products. Tobacco today is even more demonized than pot, already an illegal drug, so what’s to say that a ban – one more nail in the coffin of free enterprise – isn’t somewhere in the offing.
The war against smoking is a nearly one-sided fight, with the forces of prohibition led by professional busybodies and agents of the state riding down the few last defenders of personal choice in the case of smoking in private establishments – most of whom are already in full retreat. Still, non-smokers might well want to consider the fate of their smoking brethren. In just 25 years, public smoking has been thrown out of nearly every airline worldwide, six U.S. states have banned it in all “public” areas (with few exceptions) and a world anti-tobacco treaty went into effect yesterday – although without American participation.
Just remember, those of you enjoying your drinks and steaks in the soon-to-be-smoke-free bars and restaurants of this nation – they’ll be coming for you folks next.
At least we have Johnny Depp on our side.
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