The following is a modification of my position. I tried to follow the
thread, but my ISP's software won't allow the lengthy address required, I think.
Sorry.
Bans and prohibitions imposed by government are a slippery slope. One
has only to look at the abortion issue today and bans and prohibitions of the
past to see the problem. The time for the government to step in and regulate the
private lives of citizens is when a failure to communicate a threat to their
welfare exists. When I was a child, the US Surgeon General declared the
connection between smoking tobacco and lung cancer; and from that event until today
when we know much more about the pathology of smoking is a relative blink of
the eye in the context of cultural evolution. I started smoking around ten
years after the Top Doc's determination, but I managed to quit ten years later.
Many good laws followed this revelation of the obvious, including Phyllis Kahn's
Clean Indoor Air Act, but there have to be some reasonable limits even for
"good" laws at some point.
Because tobacco smoking is still a cultural norm for the nicotine
addicted segment of the population immune to relavations of science due to reduced,
but ongoing marketing, distribution, and peer use of tobacco, a dwindling
number of folks are still going to smoke to their detriment and that of others.
They need places to smoke and the rest of us need to avoid these places like the
plague and the latter is what needs to be addressed by governmentârather than
a ban, a quarantine is needed now.
So the most powerful thing that government can do to protect citizens and
workers is to provide for this quarantine. Sufficient smoke free nicotine
delivery methods are available to sequester smokers in public. Venues for smoking
are sufficiently obvious enough for nonsmokers to avoid but could be made
more so. I believe that safer nonsmoking working conditions will be available for
those who do not smoke, leaving smoking employees to man the tobacco dens
that I expect to dwindle in number because no business could afford health
insurance coverage for these folks. It would be unconscionable not to provide this
coverage, however, and with a quarantine in effect, providors could be certain
that premiums cover the expected claims. The increased cost of such coverage
is just one more market limit on smoking.
If a business proprietor wishes to cater to smokers and their inseparable
companions, let her do it exclusively. No one goes into a heroin shooting
gallery if they don't belong there for some reason, whether it is due to
addiction or stupidity, or to serve and exploit the addict. There is no sign on the
shooting gallery because we have deemed certain narcotics as illegal in this
country, despite any good clinical use that they might have, because the
government has seen fit to step in and dictate how citizens may destroy their lives
via narcotics addiction; no doubt about how effective that approach is (sarcasm
is allowed, isn't it?). We have not recognized problems to the same extent
involving "safer" things like tobacco, alcohol, and other addictive substances.
If someone chooses to assault their bodies with dangerous substances, we should
ask ourselves if it is more important to protect them from themselves or to
protect others from being harmed incidentally because the two may be mutually
exclusive for economic reasons.
My point is that in dealing with this problem at this time, paving the way
for businesses to provide the public what they want and need is a better way
to deal with public health threats than dictating how their patrons should
behave. I don't care if bars and restaurants go bust unless the proprietors are
friends or relatives, but I am but one patron who prefers good food, drink, and
entertainment in a smoke free environment. Addictions die hard, but they die
with the individual in one way or another. We pays our money and takes our
chance.
All you need is signage and disclosure in advertising whether it is a
whirligig of a staggering drunk holding a big cigar or cigarette mounted outside
a bar or signs identifying a place to eat, smoke, and drink too much. We can
let folks know that their intelligence or stupidity and their money are welcome
if they came to buy what the business has to offer, but they need to know
what that is.
I think all of the laws protecting folks from the dangers of smoking over
the years have been great, but at some point you must stop and let people
live their own lives without instructions from the government. The time for a new
approach is now, I think. Smokers who smoke in the presence of those who
choose not to smoke or be exposed to second hand smoke have no rights to do so
unless the latter folks give up their rights; they have done just that today when
they choose a non-smoking section because those areas are mythical in my
experience. Local ordinances establishing exclusive smoking or nonsmoking bars and
restaurants are needed because there is no way to guarantee that the air is
smoke free without choosing one or the other. You could ban smoking in all
restaurants and bars for the same end as is now proposed, but why bother?
So what is simpler, fairer, more effective, and cheaper? An outright ban
or a simple change in the way we license hospitality businesses? I think the
latter.
Bill Kahn
Prospect Park
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