Anti-Smoking Campaign

* Re “Smoking and the Self-Righteous,” Voices, Dec. 5: Susan Self makes an interesting point when she says, “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.”

Unfortunately, in America this is not the case in practice. You get to decide, but if you make a mistake everybody gets to pay for picking up your marbles. This is, I think, the basis for the states’ suit against the tobacco companies for medical costs related to cleaning up the health problems from their products. Until smokers are forced to die untreated (thereby at least reducing the risks of secondhand smoke that they don’t produce posthumously), the campaign against smoking is necessary.

KARL BALKE

Westlake Village

*

* Self’s ability to stand arguments on their head is deserving of a job with the tobacco industry. If she’s a lawyer, they could use her: equating the battle for smokers’ rights with those for civil liberties? Talk about self-righteous! “Tiresome anti-smoking ads” that get no rebuttal? Where the heck are all those advertising billions the industry has spent all these years? The “government” is doing it to us? Who passed all those propositions in this state in the last 15 years?

She bemoans these efforts in the name of a “free society”--like we had a choice to go to nonsmoking public places in the past? Yeah, if remaining isolated in one’s home is exercising choice! I applaud her refusal to join a “culture of fear” and welcome her to a wakened society of outrage. I don’t feel morally superior; I’m just breathing easier. My father, who died of lung cancer, is not.

JACK DRAKE

Redondo Beach

*

* Glad to see the essay by Self. I too am sick of all the childish drivel that attempts to bash us into line about secondhand smoke. I am a nonsmoker, don’t want teens to smoke, hope everyone who wants to can quit, but am insulted by the idea I can’t think for myself or must somehow be under the spell of tobacco companies to feel this way!

The issue is our right to make adult choices and take responsibility for ourselves. Before you know it the health nannies are going to get on our case about drinking alcohol, eating fats and who knows what else they don’t like! We who consider ourselves adults are deeply offended by this culture of fear attempting to dumb us down by vastly overstating their so-called facts.

GWEN GORDON

Sierra Madre