Smoking and the Self-Righteous

If you would like a textbook lesson in mob rule, reach into your pocket and take out a cigarette. When your potential executioners are at the point of apoplexy, take a long, long drag, and blow the most perfect smoke rings you’re capable of.

You know the tide has turned when a nonsmoker like myself is starting to feel sympathy for cigarette companies. But like the ACLU defending the Nazi marchers in Illinois, someone has to take a stand for principle.

Tiresome antismoking radio spots, with no rebuttal following, continue to pollute the otherwise balanced airwaves. Billboards depicting lung-less cowboys and sarcastic debutantes clog airspace. Then there is the TV commercial created by the state of California--and obviously financed by me--that boldly flaunts misleading statistics. After some art-house footage of a smoking toilet, the commercial triumphantly announces that 54,000 people die annually from secondhand smoke. So there. Case closed. No smoking in bars for the rest of eternity. We’re the government and we’re making the decisions around here.

An Internet investigation revealed the following: There have been 34 studies of the effects of secondhand smoke noted by the Congressional Research Service and only seven found significant negative health effects. One actually found benefits. What these studies mean, in the words of the Economist magazine, “is that the effects are so small as to be hard to pin down with any certainty at all.”

That didn’t sound like a scientific slam-dunk to me, so I called a less predictably sympathetic source: a public health physician at the Rand Institute. After a few nit-picking comments about the size of the control group, he told me that yes, indeed, secondhand smoke is nobody’s friend, but to keep in mind that these studies were done on the spouses of smokers--people who lived with smokers, in the same house, following them around everywhere. To occasionally lurk in a smoky bar isn’t going to make much difference to your health in the long run.

So why do we have laws about bars and not about homes?

In a free society, you get to choose what payoffs are worth what risks. You get to decide what a good life is and then promise to shut up if it’s over all too quickly.

A probe of the national psyche is called for. Why is cigarette smoking now considered the eighth deadly sin? Granted, there is always something patently annoying about a person who lives a little too close to the edge and refuses to apologize. Or perhaps it’s because smoking conveys a contempt for the current ethos that holds health as evidence of morality. Maybe it’s the refusal to join in the culture of fear. How dare you, Mr. Smoker, continue in your evil ways? Don’t you think these statistics apply to you? Do you realize how much time we all spend to convince ourselves that these years of boredom are going to pay off in 30 additional years of life--grim, spartan and rife with wheat germ.

Virtue no longer seems to be its own reward: If people have renounced all of life’s pleasures, why aren’t they at least getting tipsy on a sense of their own goodness? Like the neighbors whom you secretly suspect of calling the police to come break up the party because they weren’t invited, the Health Missionaries recognize it’s no fun to be alone.

So stronger action is called for. No, I’m not going to tell you to take up cigarettes, because then I’ll also have to tell you to quit blowing smoke in my face. But if you let this appalling restriction of freedom come and go without some sort of response, you are laying the foundation for further intrusions. Since the antismoking zealots have the public convinced that bar workers are basically indentured servants shackled to the cash register, it’s only logical that next year they’ll be demanding to inspect our homes, as there may be innocent children or nannies or cleaning people sitting around breathing. Soon, all smokers will have to register with the state and unattractive warning signs will be planted on lawns of those whose homes contain unacceptable levels of nicotine. Tanning booths, doughnuts and motorcycles will be next, and inevitably we’ll be getting wake-up calls for required morning exercises with our neighbors while oversized speakers blast out inspirational lyrics. So the next time that someone asks you if they can smoke, go ahead and say no, but thank them for trying.