It was good manners. Now it's the law.

I'm sure the "owner" of the establishment you visited is more interested in the sensibilities of people who visit bars more than once in 5 years.

Yes, that's very much the point. When secularism destroys manners we turn to the law.

Why shouldn't I be allowed to open a bar or restaurant here where smokers would be welcomed? Oh yeah, I remember, the issue is supposedly workplace safety, not nonsmokers' sweaters.

Now if we could get someone to do something about all that awful cheering and rowdiness at sporting events. It's such a bother the 1 or 2 times a year I attend.

OJ:

And that bit about hanging up your sweater is Mr. Rogersesque

When secularism destroys manners we turn to the law.

This law is secularism clothed in Puritanism. I prefer the real thing; at least it knew a real problem (say, carnal desire) when it saw one.

David:

Won't you be my neighbor?

TCB:

They've already had to--serving LA beer instead of real stuff, but you're right about how bad the behavior has become.

As I've often said about the situation here in CA, militant anti-smoking has become the State Religion. (When you've Evolved Beyond Such Primitive Superstition, it's amazing how many of your own you can come up with and how fervently you act on them...)

Militant anti-smokers are so Righteous because they are Saving Our Souls (and especially Saving Their Own Souls for being so Righteous -- everyone genuflect). This Righteousness (TM) exists in isolation from any other behavior; one of my most surreal experiences was watching a predatory homosexual ehebephile getting Holier-than-Thou over being against smoking.

"And if I rack him 'til he die, then I will have Saved His Soul." -- The Inquisitor, from Mark Twain's Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

One has no more right to open a smoking den than a heroin shooting gallery.

Mr. Judd;

Then why is tobacco legal and heroin illegal? Doesn't that have some tiny effect on one's rights to open a smoking den vs. a heroin den?

Heroin is slightly more regulated, but probably not for long. Easy to see the next Democratic president and congress outlawing it outright.

Orrin:

And once they outlaw drinking, your annual visit to the bar will be free of loud voices and swaying louts too.

Do you rush to wash your sweaters every time you barbeque, burn leaves or roast marshmellows?

Paul: The Puritans weren't quite so, er, puritan as that.

Calm down, oj. Tobacco has been around a long time. Early America's largest export was tobacco, big reason for settling the country. Freedom of association and private property should mean something to you. If you want to drink only within your particular utopia, stay home or find a smoke free bar, or move to California.

You're a bit social engineer. Nothing wrong with that but not everyone agrees with you. I'll let you drink in a smoke free environment if you'll let me have a smoking-allowed establishment, is that OK?. Keeping company with radical anti-tobacco or drink types seems out of character. It's not good company. BTW- the stats you cite are comapred with post 9/11 NYC. They are skewed. Talk to bar/restaraunt owners and waiters.

Government doesn't let you burn leaves.

Tom:

No, it's not okay. We're responsible for each other. Tobacco serves no decent purpose and does much harm.

Orrin:

You can say that about any vice. Surely we know enough about human nature and political history to know where a single-minded determination to eradicate vice will lead to. Organized crime is standing by cheering you on.

Not only are you discounting enjoyment as a perfectly appropriate reason to do something, but just yesterday you were complaining that we live too long.

Mandatory smoking for everyone (so long as we're talking Dominican tobacco with Connecticut Valley leaf wrapper).

We are demanding massive intervention and expense in order to prolong our lives, when all we really need to do is ditch some disgusting habits.

Peter:

Yet we have drug laws, drinking laws, gambling laws, sex laws, etc. Vice, if it is allowed at all, is always regulated.

To follow up David's point, I have seen at least two impressive-looking statistical studies that claim smoking saves society money by killing people off an average of seven years earlier for lifetime smokers. They were buried in all the hooplah about second-hand smoke, which was politically correct junk science.

Also, I suspect that one good vice replaces another. I may get swarmed here, but am I the only one who wonders if there is any correlation between the decline of smoking and the rise of obesity?

Peter:

Yes, in the tobacco class action suit the industry could have introduced evidence demonstrating that they save the government more in Social Security than they cost in health care. So what? We could save all that we spend on Socialk Security by killing everyone when they get to 65.

OK, I get it. This is an April Fool's post. We're all ready to call the police because some nanny-state leftist has broken into OJ's house and taken over his weblog. Meanwhile OJ is having a good laugh at our expense.

But we aren't talking about killing. We are talking about a voluntary, noxious habit indulged in freely that may or may not hasten death. It's effects are very long term and the immediate danger or deprivation is nothing compared to alcohol or gambling. Surely that is a big difference in kind.

I'm all for endless regulations keeping the pure of nose and lung protected from any exposure to the noxious weed, but a total ban is a response to the idea of smoking rather than the nuisance of smoke and criminalizes behaviour for no good purpose. It is also highly elitist in the looking down one's nose way.

Actually, the statutes passed by the states to allow the states to sue the tobacco companies prohibited the companies from introducing evidence of the money that tobacco saved the states by reducing life expectancy.

Now, try to explain that sentence to Washington or Jefferson, or even Adams.

I'm an elitist, just not elite

David:

Right, it was in a federal lawsuit that they'd have been able to mitigate. They ought to sue to collect what they've saved us all.

I live in Kentucky so this argument about smokefree any place is pretty much moot. Needless to say I ALWAYS put my clothes in the washer upon returning home from a night out.

The only positive aspect of smoking bans is that it concentrates the party girls outside, as well as providing ready made conversation starters with them ("Look at that dweeb in the sweater sitting at the bar all by himself while we are forced to be out here smoking"). It seems Las Vegas is becoming the last redoubt of freedom in this country.

Carter:

Exactly. Vegas, as their ads imply, is a place to go do things you should be ashamed of.

oj-

Who made you king? "It's not OK"! Spare me.

51% makes you king and cigarettes are on the wrong side of the %s

I have no problem with people smoking. I just have a problwm with smokers being allowed to purchase health insurance.

Jason:

Or be covered by your tax dollars or die on the hospital dime so it gets passed on to you. Folks are arguing as if the modern world didn't exist and the Man was coming to your sod homestead to take away your tabbacky.

Jason:

That is a common and quite rational objection, sort like the progressive doctors that threaten to refuse to treat smokers. But have you thought where that logic leads you?

A) Are you including the dying, smoking hero of Iwo Jima? The selfless, hard-working father of six that made it all happen? Robert Bork?

B) How about forty+ joggers. The incidence of knee and hip replacement, and back surgery, is going to soar in coming years, and nobody can say we don't know it.

C) How about dangerous sports like hang-gliding and Jeff's race-car driving?

D) Then there is diet. Twenty-five years ago, sugar was "white death" and we were all putting disgusting buckwheat honeys in our coffee and tea. Fifteen years ago, anyone who ate chicken skin was courting an immediate coronary. Now we shudder at the word CARB! Alcohol is making a comeback as a health tonic.

Life outlives fashion. And on this score, science is usually fashion.

Smoking was never a problem for me. At 1st whiff I simply turn around and walk out. I don't care how great the premises is.

I'm with you Jason.

You guys need to think a little more about the concept of "insurance."

Now here is a barking mad statement: "or die on the hospital dime so it gets passed on to you."

News flash: Everyone, not just smokers, dies.

Of course, if we believed in freedom, we would allow smoking-only establishments.

But the busy-body nanny-statists are absolutely allergic to people making their own decisions.

>D) Then there is diet. Twenty-five years ago,
>sugar was "white death" and we were all putting
>disgusting buckwheat honeys in our coffee and
>tea. Fifteen years ago, anyone who ate chicken
>skin was courting an immediate coronary. Now we
>shudder at the word CARB! Alcohol is making a
>comeback as a health tonic.

This always reminds me of Woody Allen's Sleeper...

>But the busy-body nanny-statists are absolutely
>allergic to people making their own decisions.

I prefer the term "Kyle's Mom", after the type specimen of Concerned & Compassionate Activist (TM) from South Park.

But back to smoking. Back when the "Smoke-free Society by 2000!" T-shirts and posters were going up, I had a laugh. No society after the introduction of tobacco has ever been able to reduce its use to zero, no matter how harsh and severe their anti-smoking campaigns have been (and there have been a lot). I figured a more realistic goal would be to have it stabilize somewhere around 15% or so of the population (down from the peak of over 50% sometime around 1950). This would reduce smoking-related problems by around 2/3, which would still be a significant improvement.

Ah, but to the Kyle's Moms of the world, only 1000% Total Victory is acceptable. Anything less, and they might have to look in the mirror and see imperfect mortals in an imperfect world. (Remember the final verse of "Blame Canada"?)

P.S. My spies tell me a couple weeks ago SP aired a very funny/nasty episode specifically about all the hysteria that currently exists around tobacco.

Good Lord. You've officially been unbookmarked. (Or un-Favorites-ed, in the case of Internet Explorer.) You're more dangerous than a leftie who at least KNOWS he's a leftie.

Jeff:

Not everyone murders themself slowly and expects others to pick up the pieces.

OJ:

People get old, people die. If not by lung cancer, then years in a nursing home.

My uncle died last week, a month after discovering he had cancer. He was a smoker. Cost to the public: hospice provided analgesic morphine.

My grandmother died last year after years in a nursing home. She wasn't a smoker.

Bet if you did the numbers, the cost to die of smokers is scarcely different from non-smokers. They just do it earlier.

A few years ago, the WP ran an item on what per-pack tax would be required to cover the incremental costs a lifelong smoking habit imposes on the health care system. Using high-side numbers, that came to about 32 cents/pack.

And that was without including the savings to Social Security.

Smokers are already paying to pick up their own pieces. In Michigan, they are paying something like 7 times that amount.

So what's the problem?

That's great--they met fate.

Smokers murder themselves. No decent society allows self-murder.

But I'm amenable to prohibitive taxation rather than an outright ban--that way we preserve the facade of "freedom" if not the reality.

No decent society I know of has allowed tyrants to make those sorts of decisions for others.

Remind me never to take any stick from you about being a statist--you have revealed yourself here to be the champion of the breed.

How about being amenable to actual freedom?

To the contrary, where such self-destructive instrumentalities are involved we allow rather little freedom--drugs, alcohol, etc., are all strictly regulated or even forbidden. No one has ever considered them to be important to human freedom.

Orrin:

On the contrary, the problem of vice has always been front and center in debates over freedom. Religion too.

"Smokers murder themselves"? Maybe you should lie down a bit. Can I get you an aspirin?

Peter

I'm very glad to say that I agree 100% with everything you've written in this thread, even if I am a horrible darwinist.

:)

Peter:

No, my wife, the pulmonologist, will get me one when she gets back from treating lung cancer and emphysema patients and informing their families how long they have to live...

Orrin:

Do you believe you and your wife hate tobacco any more than Carrie Nation hated alcohol?

Carrie Nation was right to hate alcohol. Prohibition was a noble failure. Alcohol is too deeply engrained in the culture and has too many positiove benefits to be banned outright. The system of ferocious regulations we've replaced it with suffices for much of the job, though alcoholism stills reaps a terrible toll on society.

"Smokers murder themselves. No decent society allows self-murder."

That is a strange position for someone who advocates suicide.

I don't advocate it--I don't think we can stop it and remain decent. Similarly, we can't stop smoking so should ban cigarettes.

OJ:

I beg to differ. You do in fact advocate suicide.

What you can't do is both believe in freedom and ban cigarettes.

Full disclosure: I am a life long non-smoker.

Jeff:

I don't believe in freedom. It's a means, not an end.

No end is worth the candle if freedom won't get you there.

Your teammates, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, et al, have long since proven that.

Jeff:

Yes, that's the difference between a libertarian and a conservative: for the libertarian all that matters is his own freedom; for the conservative what matters is a decent society. Both ends can not be achieved at the same time because your freedom is indecent.

OJ:

Did you read what I wrote?

I didn't say all that mattered was my own freedom, only that any goal that can't be reached through freedom probably isn't reachable at all.

As all attempts so far have proven, although your totalitarian reflex seems to have blinded you to that.

How can freedom be indecent? That makes as much sense as saying guns kill people.

oj-

Do you see any contradiction here? The libert/safety conundrum and creeping statism of this issue should arouse some caution on your part. The benevolance of a dictatorial power does not vitiate its dictatorial and arbitrary nature. The freedom to associate and the peaceful use of private property trumps your concern for a sweater that might smell bad. Majorities can be tyrannical too.

Tom:

Yes, there is a contradiction. Human beings are torn between competing desires for freedom and security. The goal has to be to strike a balance that creates a decent society. Your absolutism won't do it.

Jeff:

Your freedom entails, among other things, your "right" to kill your wife if she becomes burdensome, to kill fetuses if you don't feel like carrying them, to term, sodomoy, etc. You can't build a decent society on unbridled freedom because Man is Fallen.

OJ:

Your a fine one to charge absolutism.

Absolutely nothing in what I have said advocates unbridled freedom. Universal freedom by definition is bridled. It also means that you don't get to impinge another person's freedom if their exercise of it does not impinge upon yours.

Someone else decision to smoke does not impinge upon your freedom in any way.

Only if they smoke in private.

Second-hand smoke is harmful. Period.
It is fiercely debated about the level of danger there is, but why should anyone be allowed to harm me at all, through their own unnecessary actions ?

Who cares if it's harmful if most people find it objectionable? You owe others some courtesy.

Jeff:

Of course, I didn't seriously think you believed in freedom as an end, despite what you said. Each of us wishes to control the other but be free ourselves. You just draw lines in different places and declare yourself the sole true defender of the faith.

oj-

The absolutism is really on your part. I propose market solutions within the context of property rights and the freedom of association. Choices are created through the mechanism of liberty, you provide only one solution, "My way or the highway".

Yes, precisely like heroin.

Than make it illegal, like heroin. Until then, let people make their own decisions.

Who's an absolutist?

oj-

You.

I approved of the tavern regulation--you insist on either no restrictions or complete ban. I, as in all things, am eminently moderate.

And moderately eminent.

oj-

I would prefer the owners of the business and the customers of the business make the decision. You would prefer to dictate to those parties from on high based on what YOU believe to be right and regardless of established custom or the opinion of others. The practical application of your opinion, without any deference to those who may disagree, is the very defintion of absolutism.

Tom:

No, I have no problem with them having private smoking clubs. But when we passed civil rights laws we determined you have no right to determine your own patrons in a public establishment. And there was no public health threat there.

oj-

If I remember correctly, the grounds for such a weakening of rivate proprty rights was the wild interpretation of the interstate commerce clause, i.e. ketchup was shipped across state lines and sat on the counter of the Woolworths so the feds were to determine one's customers. Over time, the situation would have resolved itself without such weakening of the private perogative. Personally, I'm not so sure we are better off.

We're certainly not better off. Civil rights laws were a mistake.