Keep the Lifestyle Cops Out of Bars

Next January, unless the Legislature comes to its senses, it will become illegal to smoke tobacco in bars in California. In bars, mind you, those places where people consume alcohol, in some cases to the extent that it harms their health.

One would think that in a free society where no one is compelled to patronize bars in general, or any bar in particular, such a prohibition would be unthinkable. Anyone who finds smoky bars offensive can simply avoid them.

The cute angle utilized by the tobacco scolds is to pretend that the purpose of this prohibition is to protect the health of the poor bar employees. It is remarkable that anyone can say this with a straight face.

Many bar employees are smokers themselves. And no one has to work in a bar. If you are afraid that tobacco smoke in the air will make you sick, a bar is not the place for you to work, just as if you are afraid of auto exhaust, you should not be a toll collector. If people can voluntarily enter occupations with known risks, why should they not be able to work in bars where people smoke?

Another absurdity is the supposed rationale for prohibition, the notion that a whiff of tobacco smoke in the air is a meaningful health threat. If tobacco smoke had such lethal properties, there would be very little of it around, because all the smokers would have died early.

According to a study by University of Michigan scientists of data collected by the American Cancer Society’s massive Cancer Prevention Study II, involving 900,000 people, the death rate from cancer among lifelong smokers by age 75 was 1,250 per 100,000 men and 550 per 100,000 women, while among those who never smoked it was a mere 50 per 100,000. That’s 1 in 80 for male smokers and 1 in 180 for female smokers, compared to 1 in 2,000 for nonsmokers--about 20 times as high a rate, but hardly sure death.

Note the 1 in 2,000 ratio for nonsmokers. When the Environmental Protection Agency classified tobacco smoke as a Class A carcinogen, it did so on the basis of one study that suggested a connection between tobacco smoke in the air and cancer. That study concluded that a nonsmoker had a 19% increase in the likelihood of cancer from living with a smoking spouse. In other words, if 1 in 2,000 was the risk to begin with, 1.19 in 2,000 is now the risk. Just as a 19% increase in zero is still zero, a 19% increase in something minuscule is still minuscule. And that was from a lifetime of living with a smoker.

But of course it is not really out of concern for bartenders that the prohibitionists are determined to outlaw smoking in bars.

Nor is it because the prohibitionists yearn to drink in bars but are either frightened away by fears of smoke’s health hazards or repelled by its odor. Many of the tobacco scolds are also alcohol scolds, and sitting in bars drinking, with or without smoke, is the last thing they are interested in doing.

No, the reality of the matter is that lifestyle nazis are determined to force others to live in the way they think right. They yearn to stamp out tobacco smoking just as the Prohibitionists yearned to stamp out drinking. And their “secondhand” smoke terror is a powerful weapon, since many people lack all sense of proportion: Amid auto exhaust and smokestacks, they worry about people smoking near their office building’s doorways.

Not all of life’s pleasures reduce life expectancy (moderate alcohol consumption in fact increases it); smoking cigarettes certainly does. But so does everything from being overweight to traveling by plane or car, mountain climbing, auto racing and living in urban areas instead of in remote rural locations with cleaner air.

Grown-ups in a free country, as opposed to children in a nursery, ought to be able to make their own choices in these areas. Even Adolf Hitler, that strong opponent of tobacco, did not forbid smoking in bars.