CITIZENS Barbara's
Column Power-Lusting Anti-Smoking Zealots Soon Coming for
You! My mission is simple: keep the smoke away from my face. Personally, I consider
smoke up my nose to be criminal assault, and think I should be able to retaliate with a
pen up my assailant's nostril. But the Anti-Smoking Zealots (ASZes) wouldn't support that
simple solution: no place for them in it. This is the explanation for what seemed at first to be an inaccurate news story:
it stated that many in the Massachusetts anti-smoking movement are upset by the
announcement that the Department of Public Health could use the state sanitary code to
impose a statewide restaurant smoking ban. Why would an ASZ not want a statewide restaurant smoking ban? The answer, I
suspect, is another question: why should the state get to hog all the joy of pushing
people around? Town by town, city by city, ASZes press for ordinances that force
restaurants to forbid smoking on their own private premises, even though customers want to
smoke or apparently don't mind if others do. What they want or don't mind is irrelevant;
the ASZ knows better and can get the local government on his side. Most likely, he does not have the personality to get elected to the town zoning
board, where he could make people's lives miserable on a case-by-base basis. Maybe he
isn't tough enough to join the Hells Angels so he could intimidate by just riding into
town. Perhaps he was in his last year of law school before he realized he could have
become an accountant for less tuition and had a great job at the IRS. So, he had to settle
for being a common busybody. I'm not talking about those who encouraged sensible policies, like smoke-free
airplane flights for flyers who can't escape the smoke by leaving the room. I agree that
teachers shouldn't smoke in schools that the government forces kids to attend. Cigarettes
should not be allowed in hospitals, or anyplace with captive victims of annoying, possibly
dangerous second-hand smoke. But most of us non-smokers can deal with our dislike of cigarettes without the
government's help. We ask our friends not to smoke in our homes and cars, look for jobs in
places that have a considerate policy, avoid smoke-filled entertainment spots, and tell
our kids that if we catch them with tobacco they are grounded forever. Employees who work in a smoky environment have leverage in this full employment
economy. Unions can get the issue in contracts. Certainly anti-smokers can boycott
restaurants that allow smoking, and open their own "clean air," healthy food
eateries. I once attended a meeting in a small, closed room. One of the other meeters lit a
cigar. When he put it down for a moment, I picked up the ashtray and left the room with
it, promising with a smile that I'd make sure it waited for him outside. No argument, no
power struggle -- and no smoke. But for an ASZ, that solution wouldn't fly. The point is not just to rid his
environment of unpleasant vapors, the point is to make people do something that they did
not want to do: pay a higher tobacco tax, add a room to a bar, pay a fine. When an ASZ
gets a law that forbids smoking in places where he never even goes, he knows that he made
the owner bow to his will. He and local government share that glorious knowledge that we
all must do as they say or else. As long as tobacco is a legal substance, the debate is not about health, it's
about power. And because power is more addictive than tobacco, when the Anti-Smoking
Zealots are through with the smokers they are coming for the rest of us, for whatever
reason they can find. You can put that guarantee in your pipe and smoke it. Barbara Anderson is executive director of Citizens for Limited
Taxation. Her syndicated columns appear in the Salem Evening News, the Lowell Sun,
the Tinytown Gazette and MediaNews Group newspapers around the state. |