Kicking ButtThe international jihad against tobacco.

Remarks from the Fray:

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids argument strikes me analogous to a position that favors abstinence education. In both situations, there is something we don't want happening: consumption of tobacco and kids engaging in sex. And now, in both situations there is a way to do these things in a way that is safer but not wholly safe: opting for snus and engaging in safe sex.

I wonder if everyone who is against snus favors abstinence-only sex ed., and if they don't, how they differentiate between the two?

--dudeguy

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I can't imagine too many people seriously disagreeing with the notion of re-engineering tobacco for non-smoking-related research and such. Go for it! As long as it keeps the nicotine and the harm of other smoke-related stuff away from our lungs and innards, why not?

But some of the alternatives you thought were so hunky-dory for re-engineered tobacco included things like nicotine-reduced cigarettes (will we still have to deal with smoke??) and snus (didn't your linked article on this suggest pancreatic cancer hovering in the future??). I don't know, they all sound like just more creative ways to get people hooked on yet something else they don't really need. Is that what you're after?

Well, heck, go for it with that stuff, too! But good luck to you. In that hilarious book and movie "Barbarians at the Gate," RJR's attempts to test market a smokeless cigarette got this flat-out pronouncement: "it tastes like shit and smells like a fart!"

--Dana

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Although the majority of the article is interesting, I'd have to disagree with Saletan's contention that banning smoking in pubs and bars is "strange". I'd imagine that any non-smoker living in California or NY would agree with me. As a native New Yorker, I can testify that the bar experience changed overnight (in a resoundingly positive way) after the smoking ban passed. Before, I was loathe to ever enter a bar, because even minutes spent inside meant that my clothes would stink of tobacco smoke all night. All of a sudden, I could actually sit down in a pub and engage in an hours-long debate with friends without stinking like an ashtray! My bar attendance and that of most of my friends skyrocketed.

I'd like to hope that Saletan's comment "There's nothing more annoying than a stinking cigarette when you're trying to get stinking drunk" was not intended to be as snarky as it comes off. Perhaps he's unaware that not everyone goes to a bar to get "stinking drunk"? When I was a grad student, the local bar was the hub of grad student social life. As we had weekly Monday exams, nearly the entire class would converge on the one bar with Monday-night drink specials every Monday night, even the teetotalers. While some were admittedly there to get "stinking drunk", most of us were there to socialize with our classmates, dance and relax. And yes, a bar full of stinking cigarettes would have been awfully annoying when I was trying to socialize, dance and relax.

--IgmoA23

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About a year ago, I filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of my daughter (then 5) the first of its kind in the nation lawsuit involving secondhand smoke. I sued the owners of the Oakwood apartment complex in Woodland Hills, where she has lived her entire life, to require them to prohibit as a public nuisance smoking in the outdoor common areas of the complex, where even today smokers arrayed around the swimming pool, etc. can make the facilities we pay rent for unusable to her.

The trial court dismissed the suit, and that decision is now on appeal. I am somewhat confident as an attorney that the state court of appeal will reverse the trial court and revive the lawsuit. But the trial judge's decision only underscored -- for about the 300th time in my experience regarding the issue -- the need for a "give no quarter" approach at every legislative level to eliminating the involuntary exposure to secondhand smoke wherever people have a right to gather. Because the flimsy, reflexive justifications for not doing so have become enmeshed in the fabric of American culture. And the mythology (largely employed by ersatz libertarians on the right) that government is controlling your life and denying your freedom when it tells you you can't smoke somewhere still has cachet.

Even a seasoned trial judge viewed the issue through the false prism of competing "rights": those of the smoker and the person that doesn't want to breathe what all credible science has established as the toxic byproduct of that activity. And almost everyone, I would venture to say, has encountered the recalcitrant smoker that refuses to refrain from lighting up with the proffered justification, "I've got a right to smoke here."

But there is no right to smoke -- at least insofar as the term right has legal meaning, and isnt just being used colloquially to mean, "something I want to do whenever and wherever I feel like it."

A right must have a recognized textual source, e.g., a constitution, statute, judicial decision, contract. The test is whether there is a corresponding obligation and limitation on the part of the government to enable you to exercise that right. Now who can cite to a single ruling by any judicial or quasi-judicial body in favor of a smoker challenging a smoking restriction?

The fact is that for decades smokers dictated what everyone else in their vicinity had to put up with, be exposed to, and risk. Needless to say, this socially sanctioned behavior has led to a sense of entitlement in many smokers approaching that of Mitt Romney. It will continue to take the kind of backlash that makes some smokers feel aggrieved to disabuse them of these fallacies -- and embolden non-smokers to stand up for their rights. Far from being time to step back (based on a quirky anecdote at that), it is time to become even more relentless in driving the effects of smoking exclusively into the confines of the smoker's lungs.

--johnnyb

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(8/21)

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