The Cynic Express(ed) 1.15: A Breath of Stale Air

     As a disclaimer, allow me to state unequivocally that smoking, as a habit, sucks. The smoke clings to your clothing, marking a smoker or a smoker's roommates for long after the cigarette has passed. Smoking also can lead to lung cancer, which is a long, slow, and expensive way to die. Trust me. I lost my father to it. I am no militant advocate of smoking, not the kind of person who will put a bumper sticker on my car that says "You can have my cigarettes when you pry them from my cold, dead hands," which will be cold and dead enough, after two years of chemotherapy and radiation treatments and somewhere near fifty thousand dollars of cold oncology wards someone painted yellow to bolster the spirits of the walking (or rolling in a wheelchair) dead.

     But smoking is still a legal activity. Consenting adults over the age of eighteen can purchase and consume as many of the little death sticks as they want or can afford. Though some of them trace it back to the Constitution somewhere (probably to the second amendment, the right to bear arms, even against yourself), it's legal because it has not been outlawed yet. Instead, localities and state legislatures have taken it upon themselves to confine the activity as best the zealots of the anti-smokers lobby can, in hopes of nickel-and-diming the cigarette smokers, in the hopes of chasing them back under the wide, verdant tobacco leaf, out of sight and out of breath.

     The most recent of these laws, ratified amid the great baying of the anti-smoking hounds and the scent of nicotined blood, was California's recent decision to bar smoking, if you will pardon the pun, from taverns and gaming facilities. To take the haze out of smoky bar rooms and from over poker tables. With the threat of criminal charges and fines to those who would dare light up in these newly prohibited places.

     The bars and the gaming establishments are private property. A state legislature has no just cause to limit people from consensual pursuit of whatever legal self-destruction those people enjoy within the confines of a private establishment.

     "It's a public place!" Anti-smoking zealots prone to using exclamation points would shout. Well, er, no, it's not. Public places and places that the public can go are quite different. Public places are parks, highways, schools, city streets, and the great marble shrines of republican bureaucracy in every town, county seat, state capital, and federal district in the country. Into some other places the public are invited, especially to conduct commerce. An individual is rightly subjugated to the majority of those taxpayers who maintain it; in the other, he or she is not.

     Bars and restaurants and even casinos, like any other commercial edifices, are paid for, built, and maintained by private, profit-motivated individuals (or corporations, but the concept of the McBar is foreign and somewhat smirk-worthy to a Midwesterner). Those individual owners and those individual owners alone should be allowed to dictate what legal activities may be conspired to and carried out within the confines of their property. They should have the right to try to determine the preferences of their consumers and provide those consumers with an atmosphere that meshes with the consumers' appetites and interests. And if the customers want to smoke, so be it. It's the right of the entrepreneur, and as long as it's legal, it's the right of the smoker.

     "It's bad for our health!" For starters, it's not a case of heart disease within a whiff, nor even sitting next to a smoker for a whole meal. More importantly, people who don't smoke were born with two feet and a voice. They can complain and they can go elsewhere. Therein lies their freedom, to offer their opinions with their complaints and their money, in an attempt to persuade businessmen to cater to the nonsmokers. Nonsmokers can ask to sit in nonsmoking areas (We, the love of my life and I, prefer to ask for the Very Nonsmoking areas--those nonsmoking areas farthest from the smoking area). Nonsmokers can become upset when someone smokes in a nonsmoking area (like in the bathroom of a large metropolitan airport--someone recently related to me a tale of smelling cigarette smoke and complaining loudly and, I would guess, echoingly until the scent prematurely stopped wafting over the stall walls). Of course, it requires a bit of forthrightness lacking in a populace that would have the government, state or federal, solve its disputes by preemptively trampling the rights of other people.

     Maybe with all the breath and exclamation points the nonsmokers save, we can take other steps to curb smoking. The skills of persuasion and harping could better be used to urge a friend or family member to stop. After all, one person whom you love is a higher stake than the entire population of smoking strangers. Save your breath for someone who needs it.