Let's Be Reasonable in 2003

Let's Be Reasonable
Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical Columnist's Opinions & News

When you're done with this collection there's more!

Why you should buy cigarettes on the Fourth of July (even if you don't smoke)
Reason Magazine A collection of articles that rail against anti-tobacco antics.

The Liberty Manifesto
P. J. O'Rourke - Cato Inst. All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people. And that had better be clear and provable harm. No nonsense about second-hand smoke or hurtful, insensitive language, please.
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

I'd rather smoke than kiss
National Review - Florence King - 7/9/90 A misanthrope is someone who hates people. Hatred of smokers is the most popular form of closet misanthropy in America today. Smokists don't hate the sin, they hate the sinner, and they don't care who knows it.
Their campaign never would have succeeded so well if the alleged dangers of smoking had remained a problem for smokers alone. We simply would have been allowed to invoke the Right to Die, always a favorite with democratic lovers of mankind, and that would have been that. To put a real damper on smoking and make it stick, the right of others not to die had to be invoked somehow, so "passive smoking" was invented.
The name was a stroke of genius. Just about everybody in America is passive. Passive Americans have been taking it on the chin for years, but the concept of passive smoking offered them a chance to hate in the land of compulsory love, a chance to dish it out for a change with no fear of being called a bigot. The right of self-defense, long since gone up in smoke, was back.

Food Fight
Anti-fat police are ready to bust heads
Reason - Kelly Jane Torrance - December 23, 2003 NYC C.L.A.S.H. Note: Where to put this... It really should be part of our unreasonable page but it's being reported from the reasonable perspective.
"Public Health Is Everybody's Business," read the button a chirping woman pushed into my hand at November's annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in San Francisco. A day later I discovered firsthand that public health is everybody's business but mine. I was "escorted" out of the meeting for the crime of documenting what America's food fascists have planned for our plates.
A man in a "Howard Dean" cap, who refused to identify himself, made a fuss when he discovered that an operative from the Center for Consumer Freedom had infiltrated the event. (It wasn't hard; I wore my professional affiliation on my name badge.) Standing in front of my camera, he loudly proclaimed to the room that I was with a "right-wing foundation," and claimed that I had misrepresented myself. Maybe it was a personal thing—he told the group that CCF and I hate fat people like him. He managed to get me ejected for videotaping the proceedings, and I left to the sound of a hundred busybodies clapping. (Although not before one duly noted to an official that she had seen me taping other sessions. I wondered if she hoped they would ransack my hotel room.)
Never mind that the conference (for which I paid my $500) had no official rule against recording. Or that I was told members of the media were welcome to make videos. APHA members didn't want me to record what they were up to, and I can't blame them. If Americans were aware of what this group and social engineers like it have are planned, they would gag on their Grand Slam Breakfasts.
APHA members used to worry primarily about preventing AIDS and slowing the spread of contagious diseases. Now their big concern is what you and your family eat. Politically charged talk about the so-called "epidemic" of obesity has, itself, reached epidemic proportions. Elected officials, presidential candidates, mid-level bureaucrats, and left-wing activist leaders are playing a high-profile game of leapfrog to see who can come up with the most outrageous proposals.
Busybodies are looking to control one of the most basic of human functions—eating. Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate snack-food and soft-drink marketing. New York state assemblyman Felix Ortiz promotes a draconian "Twinkie tax." At least one person who's had the Bush Administration's ear has bought into the idea that Americans are not accountable for their own weights. "Many people believe that dealing with overweight and obesity is a personal responsibility," former Surgeon General David Satcher recently said. "To some degree they are right, but it is also a community responsibility." It takes a Samoan village.
The American Public Health Association is over 125 years old. More than 60 percent of the full-time researchers and policymakers at state Departments of Health are APHA members. And over 13,500 members attended last month's San Francisco meeting. It was ground zero for planning Public Health's "next big thing."
Attendees were well versed in obesity-epidemic rhetoric, chuckling en masse at anti-corporate jokes. In their world, it's an article of faith that the food industry is largely to blame for America's collective weight problem. It's no surprise that they loved media darling Marion Nestle's talk on food politics at a session sponsored by APHA's Socialist Caucus.
Speaker after speaker scorned the notion that individual Americans are responsible for their own choices. Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI—the Ralph Nader spinoff that has already ruined movie popcorn for millions of us), made no effort to hide her agenda. "We have got to move beyond personal responsibility," she pleaded with her audience. In a session titled "The Politics of Food," Skip Spitzer of the radical Pesticide Action Network added that "the idea of 'personal responsibility'" is merely "a cultural construct," ready to be superseded for our own good.
Yale psychologist Kelly Brownell, best known as the father of the "Twinkie tax," was one of the meeting's most popular speakers. Showing some politicking skill, Brownell suggested that activists should make use of children to sidestep commonsense arguments about personal choices: "Another, very utilitarian reason for focusing on children, of course, is then you get away from these arguments about personal responsibility."
Incidentally, Brownell scoffed at the idea that obesity can be successfully treated and reversed. Funny he should think so. The Associated Press noted last year that he gained a good deal of weight while writing a book. The experience apparently "kept him relatively sedentary and snack-prone." In San Francisco, Brownell appeared considerably leaner and meaner, but offered no hint as to which tax or other government program helped him shed the extra pounds.
Robert Ross, CEO of the $3.4-billion California Endowment, led a session named (without a hint of irony) "Is Childhood Obesity the Next Tobacco?" that boasted some of the convention's most heated rhetoric. Ross asked: "Do we go out for all out holy war against industry from day one?" Answering his own question, he later declared that "the most prolific weapons of mass destruction in this country are a cheeseburger and a soda."
What would the world look like if decision-makers listened to these nannycrats? Public Health Institute lawyer Edward Bolen provided a glimpse of their Utopia, promoting very specific policy ideas. He called for tobacco-style restrictions on food, including price controls; minimum age requirements to buy certain foods (Does a bag of chips really need to be rated "R"?); zoning limits on the number, density, and location of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores; and even outright product bans. "Any sort of interaction you can put between [a] consumer and the product is going to cut the use," Bolen noted.
Shrewd stuff indeed. But don't expect these activists to be honest while they remake American cuisine. Imagining a world where 7-11 stores would have to move high-calorie snacks behind the counter (presumably next to the cigarettes and porn magazines), Bolen mused, "You can probably rationalize it as cutting down on shoplifting."
Driving extra miles for a burger, showing your license to buy a Snickers, paying $10 for a soda (outside the movie theater)—this still isn't enough. Public health activists are hinting at their preference for completely abolishing some distinctly American foods we all love. CSPI's Wootan noted—as if it were a bad thing—that "Eating out is more affordable; it's very convenient." Arguing that companies should be forced to stop marketing certain foods, Kelly Brownell added that the food industry "cannot be let off the hook for all the unhealthy products they're still promoting."
Luckily, my presence at the APHA conference wasn't noticed until its penultimate day; I was able to record a good deal of the goings-on before then. And in many cases, my camera was the only one rolling. The mass media showed remarkably little interest in a meeting attended by thousands of professionals who influence policy at every level of government, and whose endgame looks a lot like circa-1982 Soviet supermarkets. Why? Because many journalists agree with the activists. And a few high-profile broadcasters have already drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid (sugar-free, of course). A recent Peter Jennings ABC special, How to get fat without really trying, implied just with its title that our weight is not our fault. Which should really motivate the channel-surfer on the couch eating another bag of Doritos.
People laughed a few years ago when The Onion ran a spoof titled "Hershey's Ordered To Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion." It was obviously silly to think that society would deem chocoholics blameless for their own overindulgence. But after spending a few days listening to the people staffing our nation's Public Health infrastructure, I'm not laughing anymore.

Fighting for freedom
Super-size lawsuits whittling away our rights
Calgary Sun - Paul Jackson - December 22, 2003 Calgarian Jonathan Denis is a 28-year-old lawyer with one of the sharpest minds I've seen in the legal world.
I like to see him as a "trial lawyer with a conscience." We met back when he was studying his profession at the University of Saskatchewan and "working his way through college" at the Saskatchewan legislature.
We lost touch, but suddenly he jumped back into my world when I found he is now working with the prestigious law firm of McConnell, MacInnes Graham, and is also the executive director of a new consumer rights organization, the Canadian Centre for Consumer Freedom.
Most "consumer rights" organizations come from the lib-left or are union-inspired and not so much friends of the consumer, but rather enemies of the business world.
Think Ralph Nader and of lawyers who will take on any cause for a huge cut of the award.
The Canadian Centre for Consumer Freedom (www.consumerfreedom.ca) believes individual consumers should be left to decide what they buy, rather than the dictates of government or lobby groups.
Denis' organization recently hired JMCK Polling to conduct a nationwide survey on consumer attitudes.
The survey found 75% of respondents believe it is up to the individual to decide whether or not to eat convenience foods, or go to fast-food outlets.
Fully 69% believe the supposed rising rate of child obesity is the responsibility of parents, while only 9% blame restaurants or food manufacturers.
Denis contends these attitudes are significant because now the battle against smoking has basically been won, the very groups that battled Big Tobacco are now turning their attention to convenience foods and fast-food outlets such as McDonald's and KFC.
This is especially so in the U.S. where lawyers are preparing lawsuits, and Denis notes what happens south of the border tends to drift up to Canada. "We'll be opening a floodgate of frivolous lawsuits unless we fight back and draw the line."
Paradoxically perhaps, the JMCK survey found 87% of Canadians believe smoking is unhealthy, with 65 % supporting higher taxes on tobacco products, but 63% of respondents also believe federal and provincial governments are the chief beneficiaries of higher taxes on tobacco."
"They tend to think taxes collected on tobacco products should go directly to increasing health-care funding, rather than be just a convenient windfall for government from an easy whipping boy of government."
Denis believes Canadians have seen through the hypocrisy of this double-standard. "A majority also oppose using tax money to fund the anti-tobacco lobby. These funds should be used for health care instead of lining the pockets of anti-tobacco activists."
Denis, by the way, doesn't smoke, runs 10 km two or three times a week and watches what he eats.
"But these are my choices. I don't want to impose my choices on anyone else, and I don't want anyone else imposing their choice on me."
He truly does see a trend of "supersized lawsuits" that will start tying up the courts. That's why Denis contends it is every responsible lawyer's duty to protect the integrity of both the profession and the judicial system.
"When it comes to their eating and smoking habits, Canadians support choice," he says. Canadians say individuals should be responsible for their own health habits, and that governments should butt out of adults' decisions to make private lifestyle decisions."
Denis believes government shouldn't interfere in anyone's lifestyle, so long as it poses no threat to others.
"We have seen a chipping away at personal freedom and rights in recent decades as government intrudes into areas it has no business being in. We simply have to call a halt to the erosion of our rights before we have no rights left at all."
I think Denis has something here -- don't you?

Economic straight thinking
Townhall.com - Walter E. Williams - December 3, 2003 A fortnight ago, I wrote "Harm's a Two-Way Street," a column that generated considerable reader response, some of it angry and nasty. The gist of the column was that the liberty-oriented solution to the smoking controversy was through the institution of private property, where the owner of a workplace, restaurant or bar decides whether there would be smoking or not. The totalitarian solution was to use the brute force of government.
I argued that harm is a two-way street. Tobacco fumes might harm someone who is allergic or just finds the odor offensive. The person who smokes and is not permitted to do so is also harmed by being denied a pleasurable experience. Quite a few letters asserted, "Williams, you can't compare the health harm to a nonsmoker to the inconvenience harm that a smoker suffers just because he's not allowed to smoke." No, I can't and wouldn't even try. Why?
Using economic jargon, it is impossible to make interpersonal utility comparisons. Let's try a few. A dollar will bring me more happiness than it will bring you. It's better to like opera music than hip-hop music. Human life is more important than money. There's no objective way to prove any of these statements simply because there is no objective standard for comparison.
You might have an opinion, but an opinion is not proof. The same reasoning applies if you said, "The harm I suffer from your smoking is greater than the harm you suffer from not being permitted to smoke." Contrast these statements to: "You are taller than I." For such a statement there are indeed objective standards for falsifying or verifying it -- just get out the measuring instruments.
Another part of the column suggested that an owner of a restaurant, workplace or bar might post a sign indicating whether he permitted smoking or not. After all, private property rights have to do with rights held by an owner to keep, acquire and use property in ways he pleases so long as he doesn't interfere with similar rights held by another. Private property rights also include the right to exclude others from use of property.
Quite a few readers asked, "What if the owner wished to exclude blacks or some other race?" I value freedom of association. An important part of the right of association is the right not to associate for a good reason, bad reason or no reason at all. That's not to say that I don't find some forms of association offensive. But the true test of one's commitment to freedom of association doesn't come when he allows others to associate in ways he deems desirable. The true test of his commitment comes when he is willing to allow others to associate in ways he deems offensive.
One might be tempted to think that if owners were free to reject customers by race, segregation would be widespread. But that's nonsense because there's a difference between what people can do and what they'll find in their interests to do.
Think about it. During the United States' Jim Crow era and South Africa's apartheid era, there was an elaborate legal structure mandating and enforcing racial segregation. Whenever you see a law on the books, your best guess is that the law is on the books because not everyone left to their own devices would behave according to the specifications of the law. After all, why would there be a need for a law saying bars or theaters cannot admit blacks if no white bar or theater owner would admit blacks in the first place?
There're a lot of things we can disagree about, but let's have straight thinking as a part of the process.

Cruelty to Smokers
American Spectator - Gene Healy - December 2, 2003 The pall of Bloombergism has fallen over the nation's capital. On December 3, the D.C. city council will hold a public hearing on the Smokefree Workplaces Act of 2003, which would ban smoking in all bars and restaurants. In fact, the bill may go further even than New York in quashing the rights of property owners to set the rules for the premises they own.
The bill's supporters characterize secondhand smoke as a life-or-death public health issue. A coalition of D.C. unions backing the bill, including the Washington Metro Labor Council and the AFL-CIO, claim that secondhand smoke kills some 65,000 Americans a year -- a figure three times the national murder rate. (Maybe I'll start defending myself from criminal predators in my gang-ridden neighborhood by brandishing an unlit cigarette and a lighter). New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg compares deaths from secondhand smoke to the carnage of September 11. "Think about all the press attention to 9/11," he says. "That number of people die every year in the city from secondhand smoke." That's right: If we allow smoking in bars, the terrorists will have won.
Of course, the epidemiological evidence doesn't come close to justifying such extravagant claims. Since the dose makes the poison, it's far from clear that passive inhalation of secondhand smoke poses any significantly increased health risk at all. The EPA's attempt to show that it does was laughed out of court as junk science by a federal district court judge in 1998. A study released last May in the British Medical Journal used data tracking 35,561 Californians over 39 years, and concluded, "The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality."
Everyone knows that active, as opposed to passive, smoking is bad for you. And that, in large part, is what smoking bans are intended to suppress. Antismoking activists see public smoking bans as an effective way to reduce smoking by turning smokers into pariahs. At a 1986 antismoking conference, Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education explained: "although the nonsmokers' rights movement concentrates on protecting the nonsmoker rather than on urging the smoker to quit for his or her own benefit, clean indoor air legislation reduces smoking because it undercuts the social support network for smoking by implicitly defining smoking as an antisocial act."
The antismoking activists are becoming increasingly candid about what was once a private strategy. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the New Jersey-based public health group that's donated a quarter of a million dollars to the drive for a D.C. smoking ban, exults at the notion that smoking bans can be used to harass smokers and lower their social standing. On November 18, RWJ ran an eight-page advertising supplement in the New York Times. The cover features a scene from the inside of a smoke-free bar, with glamorous twentysomethings chatting and drinking martinis. Through the bar's window, you can see a forlorn group of smokers huddled in the rain and shivering. The caption reads: "No longer cool, smokers find themselves out in the cold."
Of course, few people will get misty-eyed at the image of young hipsters forced to smoke outside. But D.C. and New York aren't the only places where the crusade for healthy living through coercion is occurring, nor are twentysomethings the only victims. All across the fruited plain, the antismoking movement is helping Americans get in touch with their inner tyrant and discover the joys of self-righteous cruelty.
Case in point: There's a small public housing complex for poor elderly people in De Pere, Wisconsin. As the Green Bay Press Gazette reports, the governing board of the complex is about to force retirees out into the Wisconsin cold whenever they want to smoke. In a letter to the housing authority, one tenant begged: "I smoke in my bathroom with the door closed and the exhaust fan on so as not to impose onto others. So please allow me to smoke in my apartment so I don't have to move and pay more rent so I can smoke."
But such pleas get little sympathy from the paladins of public health. "There's not that many that smoke. It’s like a rotten apple in the bushel, one spoils it for the rest of them," said Jim Quinette, a citizen member of the board. "I'm sorry they have to put a cigarette out. But at that age, what do you need a cigarette for?"
A better question is, At that age, why shouldn't you have a cigarette? There are far nicer places to retire to than a public housing complex in Wisconsin, and simple pleasures like smoking may help combat the gloom. But in the world the lifestyle police are constructing, simple pleasures count as nothing next to the deep glow of self-satisfaction folks like Jim Quinette get from forcing you out in the cold for your own good.

Smokonomics
Reason Magazine - Julian Sanchez - November 23, 2003 In the coming months, Washington, D.C., will decide whether to join California, New York, and a host of other towns and municipalities in banning the combustion and inhalation of tobacco products in its bars and restaurants. To the delight of the self-appointed guardians of public health, my local watering hole may soon have the freewheeling ambiance of a dentist's waiting room.
The putative logic of these laws is to protect bar and restaurant workers. In reality, this is something of a fig leaf: The primary support for smoking bans seems to come from folks who don't like having to dry clean their clothes after a night out, and who are therefore asserting their God-given right to visit any bar or restaurant they like on their own terms, owners and other customers be damned.
But the anti-smoking movement's official spokespeople still seem to have the minimal decency required to be ashamed of such a naked appeal to self-interest. Instead, they've been forced to resort to the argument that workers who don't mind smoke must be protected from making stupid choices about their own bodies, while those who do mind it must be protected from the hassle of either making a trade-off or seeking a more congenial job over the course of the many years it takes for environmental tobacco smoke to increase health risks. To the extent that it does, that is—the data on the precise degree of risk involved is notoriously ambiguous.
Ban opponents have countered that those same workers may suffer as smoking patrons opt to walk a mile—home—for a Camel. Despite some evidence that this has not happened to the extent that some feared in California or New York, ban boosters seem determined to prove that, even when they seem to have a legitimate argument, it's more fun to run ads made of ecologically friendly 100 percent straw. Nobody, after all, ever claimed that smoking bans would mean that "no one will ever" go out carousing, "ever," or that it would "wipe out all" bars. And there's something more than a little disingenuous in the claim that people who continue to use non-smoking elevators won't perhaps behave differently when it comes to the decision about how long to spend at the neighborhood pub.
But putting aside this sort of intellectual dishonesty, it's nevertheless true that a welter of studies have not found a dramatic decline in aggregate hospitality sales in many areas that have enacted smoking bans. In some, business even appears to be up.
Yet aggregate data can be misleading. It may be that aggregate revenue doesn't show a drop in business, but that doesn't mean that particular restaurants aren't hurting. In fact, you can count them. The pattern emerging in nearby Montgomery County is that business is steady or improving in big chains like Ruby Tuesdays, while small independent businesses are taking a hit. In an industry with paper-thin profit margins, those places may eventually have to close—a danger that's not visible if you lump together all bar and restaurant revenues, treating them as a mega-business, rather than a collection of separate businesses.
But pretend you don't care about the diversity of nightlife: Students of Mises, Hayek, and their intellectual descendants should spot another problem with the kind of analysis that yields the conclusion that smoking bans aren't economically harmful.
I've never been comfortable with the most extreme forms hyper-a priorism advanced by some adherents of Austrian economics. As the failure of Euclidian geometry to describe our spatially curved universe proves, the internal consistency of a formal system is no guarantee that it models reality accurately. An extreme anti-empiricism can easily become a lazy way of ensuring that being an Austrian economist means never having to say you're sorry. But this seems like a case where the Austrian objection to over-reliance on econometrics seems like good counsel.
Reality, as social scientists frequently lament, is messy. Laboratory experiments can be rigorously controlled; real life is less accommodating. You can measure which way restaurant revenues trend before and after some new legislation, but establishing causality is a trickier matter. The niggling question always remains: Can we be sure we've isolated the independent variable? Have we controlled for every potential explanatory factor?
But these methodological quibbles are secondary. The Austrian insight that's most important to bear in mind when considering the wisdom of such laws is that, contrary to neoclassical assumptions, real world markets are never in equilibrium. Rather, market activity is a constant discovery process.
This is important because, absent this observation, it may well seem as though smoking bans have successfully corrected a market failure. If, in the wake of a ban, aggregate business remains constant, or even picks up, and people report satisfaction with their new smoke-free carousing environments, it seems natural to regard the new status quo as an improvement. And if smoking policies never changed, that conclusion would be right.
In reality, though, these policies change over time: Owners change their mind about which rule will be most profitable, and new non-smoking establishments open while smoke-friendly ones close down. Economists sometimes forget that markets are not lightning calculators. In an old joke, two Chicago school economists are walking down the street when they notice a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. One stops to retrieve it, and the other warns: "Don't bother; if it were really there, someone would have picked it up already." But of course, in the real world, sometimes there is money on the sidewalk.
It seems fairly clear that, at present, the market mix of smoking and non-smoking establishments is suboptimal: It does not yet fully reflect the public's growing preference for smoke free dining and carousing. If we imagine an inverted-U curve, with the relative proportion of smoking and non-smoking establishments on the X-axis and restaurant revenue (and, presumably, customer satisfaction with the available options) on the Y-axis, it's fair to suppose that, at present, localities that permit smoking are well to the left of the optimum, with the mix biased too heavily in favor of smoke-friendly joints. Smoking bans effectively jump the curve, apparently landing at a higher point far to the right of the optimum.
The problem is that, while the market process seeks to approach that optimum over time, uniform prohibition locks in an extreme, almost certainly suboptimal mix. Ironically, an excellent argument for the repeal of these restrictions is provided by the fact that some bar owners have reported with delight that, contrary to their expectations, business picked up in the wake of the ban. Those businesses now know that, given their clientele, a non-smoking policy is optimal for them. The unlucky losers, the bars whose chimneyesque customers have deserted them, discovered the opposite.
It's also worth stepping back to ask whether the debate really is—or should be—really about restaurant revenues at all. Opponents of pork-barrel spending have long cited Frederic Bastiat's famous "broken window" fallacy to explain why government spending doesn't really "create jobs," as its advocates sometimes like to claim. The money injected into the economy at one point had to first be removed somewhere else: The "seen" effect of state spending is perfectly balanced by the "unseen" loss of whatever enterprise would have been supported by the same dollars had they been left in private hands.
Yet the same holds for jobs lost to regulation. A smoker who spends less of her time and money at the local café because she can't puff a clove with her latte isn't just going to use the cash for toilet paper: She'll spend it somewhere else. There are significant deadweight losses and transaction costs while the economy adapts, of course, but it remains the case that less spending at the bar will mean more spending elsewhere.
The obvious rejoinder is that tampering with the natural market outcome makes the reallocation of spending inefficient. But "efficient" here isn't used in the colloquial sense of putting out more widgets per pound of aluminum. Efficiency in the economic sense is about using resources in the way that maximizes the satisfaction of subjective preferences. The problem with regulation isn't that it decreases the net amount of money floating around the economy—it doesn't. Rather, the problem is that it forces that money to be channeled suboptimally, into sectors less productive of customer satisfaction.
Economic arguments, arguments that look at the flow of cold hard cash, have a comfortingly scientific ring to them. You can appeal to objective-looking graphs and figures. That's why restrictions on, say, the color you're permitted to paint your house, are typically justified by an appeal to preserving "property values," rather than the simple majoritarian argument that most of your neighbors think that fuchsia with a puce trim is ugly. But, of course, all it means to say that such a color scheme would lower property values is that one expects a majority of potential buyers would find it ugly.
A smoking ban may or may not reduce revenue at D.C. bars relative to the status quo—that will depend in part on the willingness of smokers to leave the district for smoke-friendlier parts, an easier task than abandoning LA for a bar in Nevada. It will almost certainly be worse, economically, than the mix that the market would eventually achieve. But all that is just shorthand for saying that if we leave owners and customers to make their own choices, everyone can have the kind of experience that they most prefer. And while that's not the kind of argument that translates well to a PowerPoint slide, it has the virtue of being true.

Harm's a two way street
Townhall.com - Walter E. Williams - November 19, 2003 The largest losers of America's anti-tobacco crusade aren't tobacco companies and smokers, it's the American people who are incrementally giving up private property rights. You say, "Hold it, Williams, I agree that people have the right to smoke and harm themselves, but they don't have the right to harm others with those noxious tobacco fumes!" Let's look at it, because harm is a two way street.
If you're allergic to tobacco smoke or just find its odor unpleasant, and I smoke in your presence, I harm and annoy you. However, if I'm prohibited from smoking a cigarette in your presence, I'm harmed because of a denial of what I find a pleasurable experience.
There's an obvious conflict. One of us is harmed. How can it be resolved? There are several ways. You might consider the harm I suffer trivial compared to yours. You could organize a sufficiently large number of people and lobby lawmakers to enact smoking bans in bars, restaurants and workplaces. Alternatively, I might consider the harm you suffer trivial, and organize a bunch of people and lobby lawmakers to mandate that smoking be permitted in bars, restaurants and workplaces.
Let's think about this for a moment. If you owned a restaurant, and did not allow smoking, wouldn't you find it offensive if a law were enacted requiring you to permit smoking? I'm guessing you'd deem such a law tyranny. After all, you'd probably conclude, it's your restaurant, and if you don't want smoking it's your right. Similarly, I'd deem it just as offensive if smoking were allowed in my restaurant and a law were enacted banning smoking in restaurants.
The totalitarian method to resolve the conflict is through political power and guns. In other words, the group with the greatest power to organize government's brute force decides whether there'll be smoking or no smoking in restaurants. Totalitarians might justify their actions by claiming that bars, restaurants and workplaces deal with the public, and thus the public should decide how they'll be used. That's nonsense. Just because an establishment deals with the public doesn't make it public property.
The liberty-oriented method to resolve conflict is through the institution of private property. In fact, conflict resolution is one of the primary functions of private property, namely it decides who gets to decide how what property is used in what way. Put another way: Who may harm whom in what ways? In a nutshell, private property rights have to do with rights held by an owner to keep, acquire and use property in ways so long as he doesn't interfere with similar rights held by another. Private property rights also include the right to exclude others from use of property.
Under the liberty-oriented method of private property, as a means to conflict resolution, we'd ask the question of ownership. If the owner wishes his restaurant to be smoke-free, it is his right. Whether a smoker is harmed or inconvenienced by not being allowed to smoke in his restaurant is irrelevant. Similarly, if a restaurant owner wishes to permit smoking, it is his right, and whether a nonsmoker is harmed or annoyed is also irrelevant. In the interest of minimizing possible harm either way, it might be appropriate for restaurant owners, by way of a sign or other notice, to inform prospective customers of their respective smoking policy. That way, customers can decide whether to enter upon the premises.
In today's America, the successful anti-tobacco campaign has become a template for conflict resolution through the forceful imposition of wills through the political system. It's part of a continuing trend of attacks on private property rights. Private property rights are the bulwark for liberty, and should be jealously guarded and not be sacrificed for the sake of expediency.

Post-Reductio America
Tech Central Station - Radley Balko - November 19, 2003 In the world of debate, philosophy and law, there's a method of attacking your opponent's argument known as reductio ad absurdum. In this line of attack, you take your opponent's argument to its most extreme conclusion, you reveal the most absurd consequences that could come of his position, and oftentimes, in the process, you reveal the flaws in his reasoning.
Recently, Reason magazine writer Julian Sanchez, who also maintains a personal weblog, coined the term reductio creep. Sanchez came up with the term to describe the age we live in, which he suggests is increasingly becoming an age where absurdity isn't possible anymore, particularly when debating public policy, and particularly for those who happen to advocate limited government. The reductio line of attack doesn't work anymore because we live in an era where the tentacles of government penetrate every nook of our public and personal lives, and for those who advocate this massive, expansive state, there's simply no policy too intrusive, no regulation too absurd, no attempt at social engineering too ambitious that it's beyond the realm of possibility. Not only does the reductio line of argument no longer work on these people, it gives them new ideas.
Ten years ago, when the first of the tobacco lawsuits were making their way through the courts, critics rightly saw them as a subversive way of enacting public policy by bypassing the legislative process, and often used the reductio line of attack when criticizing them. The class action suits absolved the smoker of responsibility, critics said. It's ridiculous to hold the manufacturers of a legal product liable, particularly for damages incurred by smokers who were aware of the ill-effects of smoking. Take these suits to their logical conclusion, critics said, and what's to stop people from suing fast food companies for their own obesity? Why not let victims of violent crime sue gun manufacturers?
It seemed like a good argument at the time, didn't it? Try to make a reductio argument about class action suits given today's headlines. It's tough. There's really nothing too ridiculous to imagine.
About six years ago I took a creative writing class at a local community college. Each week, we'd discuss a piece of short fiction written by one of our classmates. I remember one guy wrote a piece of satire called "The Non-Smoking Section." The guy was a gifted writer. He detailed scenes where smokers huddled together under the gray skies of winter, shivering, crammed together in officially demarcated "smoking zones" drawn up by state officials. The zones that were always outside, always within sight for ridicule from nonsmokers, and always purposely drawn far too small to accommodate the number of smokers who needed to use them. The zones were so small, smokers usually ended up burning one another. Fights broke out. A few people caught fire. The guy purposely drew historical allusions to Jim Crow, even to concentration camps, to hammer home his point.
I remember that our biggest criticism of the guy's story was that it was too over the top, even for satire. Even six years ago, none of us could imagine day when public smoking wasn't allowed anywhere, particularly at privately-owned bars and restaurants.
And yet life and satire inch closer. Today, you can't smoke in New York City's theater district. You can't smoke at CBGB. In New York City, not only is my former classmate's story not overwrought, it underestimates the extent of the state's wrath for tobacco. In New York, smokers can't even huddle and shiver over their fix in the winter cold. That will only get them a citation for loitering. Of course, like all state attempts to curb "bad" behavior, the ban isn't working. It's merely creating more problems. The excise taxes on cigarettes are merely pushing the cigarette market underground. Convenience stores no longer make money off of cigarettes. But criminals do.
Now the nannies are coming to Washington, D.C. And it's likely that they'll get their way. Backed by a quarter-million dollar grant from the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (solidifying its reputation as chief financier of restricting personal choice), sentiment around town is that most of the D.C. city council is set to support the ban. Business owners in the very heart of the free world may soon be told that they aren't permitted to allow their own customers to make their own decisions about whether or not to light up a cigarette. Because the Washington, D.C. city council is set to declare that city council officials are better suited to decide what health risk Washington D.C. residents ought to take than Washington, D.C. residents themselves.
Of course, this isn't really about the right to smoke in a private business. There are plenty of businesses -- bars and restaurants among them -- that don't allow smoking. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, the scolds who want to ban smoking in Washington maintain a list of such places on their website. Oddly, that's precisely the point. There are options in D.C. for those who don't want to be bothered by secondhand smoke. "Smoke Free D.C.'s" list proves that.
Rather, this is about property rights. It's about choice. It's about a Washington, D.C. bar owner having the freedom to run his bar in the manner he sees fit, to cater to whatever clientele he wishes, and to do so without interference from a city council influenced by junk science, politically correct propaganda, and the paternalism of an alleged "public health" foundation in New Jersey.
Give these people your cigarettes, and next they'll come for your beer.
Another reductio argument? Unfortunately not.
The same Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that's sponsoring these "smoke free" initiatives around the country is also determined to restrict access to and reduce the consumption of alcohol. They've spent millions on "Fighting Back," a multi-city program explicitly aimed at curbing per capita alcohol consumption through zoning laws, advertising restrictions, bans on drink specials and happy hours, and a variety of other state-enforced initiatives aimed squarely at social drinking. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the alcohol industry is to blame for underage drinking, and suggests that curbing all Americans access to alcohol is probably the only way to curb young Americans' access to it. Trial lawyers and nanny statists are already chomping at the bit.
Legislators in New York state want to ban you from smoking in your own car in front of your own children. Anti-tobacco advocates are suggesting that family courts take the smoking habits of parents into consideration when awarding custody and visitation rights. Yep. They've just found the rhetoric to get into your home.
This stuff is beyond satire. It's beyond parody. Absurdity is dead. Welcome to post-reductio America. It's sterile. It's antiseptic. And we're all a little less free.
But hey, at least we don't go home smelling like smoke.

Smoking ban has a strong air of intolerance
Chicago Tribune - Steve Chapman - November 16, 2003 There are all sorts of restaurants in this broad land of ours. You can find Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Indian, German, Ethiopian or Greek. You can choose steakhouses or vegetarian spots, fast-food or slow, heart-healthy or artery-clogging, chain or independent, seedy or elegant. But in Wilmette, there will soon be only one kind of restaurant: non-smoking.
As a lifelong non-smoker, I don't like to see smoke when I'm eating, unless it's billowing from a barbecue pit. But I'm not one of those who think that anything that suits me should also be required by law. If I were, I'd be out campaigning for a ban on sushi, anywhere, anytime.
Wilmette has 39 restaurants, and before the ordinance was passed, 33 of them didn't allow smoking. Anyone with an aversion to the smell of tobacco had plenty of dining options even without venturing into the wilds of Evanston or Winnetka. Chicago, for that matter, has some 500 smoke-free restaurants.
But getting their way 85 percent of the time was not enough for the proponents of total bans. They bring to mind Henry Ford's Model T, which you could get in any color, as long as it was black.
The advocates insist their policy is essential for public health. They argue that secondhand smoke from cigarettes endangers the health of patrons as well as employees, and that a smoking ban is the only adequate protection.
The Environmental Protection Agency says these fumes are hazardous, but not all experts agree. John Bailar III, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago and former editor-in-chief of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is among those with doubts. "We still do not know, with accuracy, how much or even whether exposure to environmental tobacco smoke increases the risk of coronary heart disease," he wrote in 1999 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Earlier this year, an article in the British Medical Journal said much better research is needed "if we really want to know whether passive smoking increases the risk of various diseases." Even if prolonged exposure is dangerous, it's not clear that an occasional whiff in a restaurant would have any effect.
But assuming the most dire claims are true, they don't justify a one-size-fits-some policy. People choose to take risks every day, and if exposure to tobacco fumes is one, it's hard to see why they shouldn't have the option of accepting or rejecting it.
You don't like the smell of fried food? Avoid fast-food outlets. You don't like smoking? Go to a place where it's not permitted. In a sector as diverse and crowded with competitors as the restaurant industry, there should be room for places that indulge people who want to light up. Majority rule can be reconciled with minority protections.
The anti-smoking forces say that approach ignores the danger to restaurant and bar employees, who stand to breathe much more polluted air than patrons. "It's not a matter of choice to let people work in conditions that are a health risk," says Joel Africk, head of the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago.
But why not? We don't outlaw logging, even though the industry has an on-the-job death rate about 30 times higher than the national average, or commercial fishing, which is 17 times more dangerous than the typical workplace. We assume that rational adults can judge for themselves what their safety is worth.
That same principle applies equally well to waiters and bartenders. Those who detest or fear tobacco smoke can find countless employers who will accommodate their preferences. Those who don't care are free to work in restaurants that tolerate smoking.
But tolerance doesn't count for much among anti-smoking activists, who think diversity goes too far when it shelters a noxious habit. Their approach is a reversal of the old Burger King slogan: Have it our way.

Big Mac and Big Brother
Townhall.com - Bill Murchison - November 11, 2003 If, as matters stand already, the House and the Senate can't come together on Medicare drug policy, wait until the federal government pronounces obesity a disease.
"This year," relates The New York Times, "150 bills have been introduced in state legislatures, more than double the number the previous year -- and 10 in the last six weeks alone ... " Bills to do what? Why, of course, to Address the Problem in the political manner, with laws, regulations, demands, subsidies, you name it.
It is malicious to make fun of any disability. A point, nonetheless, requiring more thought is that it is malicious to give the government work for which it isn't even qualified, such as keeping watch and ward over how Americans eat and exercise.
Weight legislation is the latest form of Big Brother welfarism, or will be once this stuff -- for instance, required nutrition information on restaurant menus -- starts to pass, as it very well might. A decade or so ago, the idea of generally imposed bans on cigarette smoking was from Mars -- distant and scary. Then, Mars moved into alignment with Earth's political trends. Try finding these days a restaurant or business office in which to light up.
The villains of the food fight are fast-food companies like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Allegedly, because they sell all this stuff that ruins people's lives, they should be reined in.
Horsefeathers! To live is to choose. To choose a Big Mac with a 24-ounce Coke in preference to water and green salad is to live. Not, perhaps, to live as well or as long, but, then, the life of freedom is more than a series of boxes to be checked off on orders, or overbearing hints, from the government.
What the government's would-be enforcers propose is approximately what that quaint old institution, the family, used to provide: oversight, supervision, instruction in the particulars of life. It would be unfair to blame the obesity "epidemic" solely on the family's ongoing decline as arbiter of culture and standards. It is worth remembering anyway that, where and when the universe is properly ordered, Big Daddy outranks Big Brother.

Anti-Smoking Campaign is Anti-Freedom
Intellectual Conservative - Alan Caruba - November 7, 2003 Discriminating against smokers has become an acceptable prejudice in America, thanks to the way they have been identified as a threat to everyone around them.
I am a smoker. I literally start my workday by lighting up one of the two or three cigars I puff my way through every day. I could quit if I wanted to, but I don’t. I like smoking cigars. My father smoked a pipe for as long as I knew him. My Mother never smoked, but was around his so-called “second-hand smoke” her entire life. She died at age 98. He died at age 93.
I was moved to think about this by an intriguing book by Michael J. McFadden, “Dissecting Antismoker’s Brains." Its ultimate concern is yet another United Nations’ plan to control everyone’s life; a ban on all tobacco use initiated in 1975 and being pursued by its World Health Organization. Its immediate concern is the way Americans in particular have been lied to and manipulated by a diabolical campaign to deprive us of the choice to smoke or not. This campaign is essentially about taking away a freedom we thought we had.
Two organizations, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and Group Against Smoker’s Pollution (GASP) have been around a long time, spewing out enough lies about smoking to fill a library or two. McFadden points out their tactic was to make non-smokers feel separated from smokers as “a distinctly important group.” The threat smokers were said to represent never existed. Going all the way back to the 1979 Surgeon General’s report, the science then and now demonstrates that “Evidence that tobacco smoke is antigenic in man, however, is meager and controversial…”
A leading epidemiologist, Michael Thun, was quoted in the Washington Post earlier this year saying, “There’s no definitive way of establishing the cause of a cancer in an individual. Are there people that develop lung cancer without exposures (to any of the known cancer-causing agents)? No one knows.” While logic suggests that smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer, the fact is, “no one knows” if this is the trigger or whether a genetic or other factor played a role. However, on the basis that smoking automatically leads to lung cancer, the American Lung Association is the third organization, along with ASH and GASP, to work endlessly to restrict the right to smoke anywhere and everywhere.
So, if you eliminate the argument that smoking in the workplace, in restaurants and other public places poses no scientifically verifiable threat to anyone, it is simply astounding to contemplate that, by the middle of 2001, the American Medical Association reported that states were spending more than $880 million on antismoking activities. This is such an appalling waste of money that could be allocated to the real social problems, one would expect some public outrage. But as McFadden points out, we’ve been effectively brainwashed to think that a real health threat exists, smokers are less deserving of their Constitutional rights as others, and that anti-smoking programs are working.
Columnist George Will wrote in May that “tobacco policy radiates contempt for law. Cynical lawmaking produced the $246 billion settlement of an extortionate suit by 46 state governments against major tobacco companies, purportedly as recompense for smoking-related health care costs. Never mind that governments probably profit from smoking in two ways. Cigarettes are the most heavily taxed consumer product, but are usually not taxed so heavily that too many smokers give up the lucrative (for governments) habit. Furthermore, governments reap savings in the form of reduced spending for Social Security, pensions and nursing home care for persons who die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses.” The hypocrisy, if not outright criminality, i.e., extortion, involved in the punitive lawsuits against the tobacco companies, is yet another cause for outrage, but it’s just not there.
Discriminating against smokers has become an acceptable prejudice in America, thanks to the way they have been identified as a threat to everyone around them. As McFadden points out though, “If by some chance they (the anti-smoking campaigners) succeeded in eliminating smoking from the face of the earth there would be virtually no time lapse before they sank their fangs into Big Auto, Big Meat, Big Soda, or whatever supposedly idealistic cause was out there that would promise them Big Money and Big Power.”
The fact is, there are groups already engaged in activities designed to exploit or destroy these industries and we see this in the work of the “food police” advocates, the “animal rights” propagandists, and the incessant hatred directed against SUVs by environmentalists.
In America, the power to control your life and everyone else’s presumably is based on the “consent of the governed,” but the restrictions on smoking were generated primarily from the courts. Legislators went along because it promised a new source of funding for their endless schemes. The problem is that everyone lost and everyone loses when the lifestyle choice to smoke or not is denied.
It is a pure fiction that people are safer in so-called “smoke-free” facilities. The science concerning the amount of measurable compounds to which they are exposed demonstrates it is so infinitesimal as to pose no threat whatever. In 1989, the report of the Surgeon General noted that close to 90% of the weight of tobacco smoke is composed of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and plain water. These are natural and necessary components of the environment. Scare campaigns, however, have succeeded in creating fears about smoking that have ultimately deprived everyone of the freedom to smoke anywhere.
Giving up just one freedom is giving up one freedom too many. Everyone pays a price for the loss of any freedom to anyone or any group. That is why, in America, we defend the right of people with whom we disagree to express themselves. You may or may not be a smoker, but you should have a very real concern about the anti-smoking politicians and others who continue to trample on freedom.

Smoking ban violates businesses' rights
Lexington Herald-Leader - Jack Weir - October 20, 2003

Jack Weir is a professor of philosophy at Morehead State University
According to the U.S. Constitution, the judicial branch is to protect our freedoms and rights from the overreaching power of government. Every law and ordinance takes away some freedom. At issue in the smoking ban is the extent of local government's authority to limit liberties given to individuals by federal and state constitutions and laws.
No one questions that tobacco is unhealthful or that local government has the authority to regulate activities dangerous to health. The real issue is: Are these two premises on their own enough to justify the broad scope of the ban?
Other rights and freedoms are in conflict with the ban. The First Amendment gives us the right to assemble peaceably. Surely, then, law-abiding adults should be allowed to peaceably assemble for the purpose of smoking tobacco. The important matter is that smoking is a legal freedom enjoyed by adults.
Whether assemblies of smokers are public or private and enclosed or unenclosed is irrelevant. Only two conditions are relevant: Are minors present? Was anyone forced to attend?
As with other adult-only activities, local government may pass an ordinance prohibiting minors from attending.
Nothing forces non-smoking adults to go into places where people are smoking. Just as non-dancers are not required to go to dances, non-smokers are not required to go into places where people smoke.
Typically, an assembly of smokers also engages in other legal activities, such as playing pool, bowling, drinking alcoholic beverages and eating food. Many non-smokers also want to participate in these other activities, but without inhaling secondhand smoke. So, the ban prohibits everyone from freely assembling in an enclosed public place for the purposes of both smoking and engaging in the other activities.
Surely this is excessive. People who want to participate in two legal activities should not be prohibited from doing both together merely because other people do not want to. This clearly discriminates against otherwise law-abiding citizens who want to do the two lawful activities together.
Non-participants are free to have their own assemblies.
Sometimes non-smokers are employed in places smoking is allowed. Therefore, the ban prohibits everyone from smoking. This, too, is excessive overreaching by government. No one forces non-smokers to work in these places. They can quit.
What if they cannot get another job (or as good of a job)? That would be a misfortune. But that is not the smoker's fault and does not justify taking away the smoker's freedom. Nor is it the employer's fault. It does not justify taking away the employer's right to engage in an otherwise legal business. If it were not for the employer, there would be no jobs, even for smokers.
With other jobs that are dirty, risky or unhealthful, the most government can require is that employers take reasonable measures to guard the well-being of workers by requiring gas masks, hard hats and so on. It would be reasonable for local government to require employers to provide non-smoking employees with gas masks, but not to ban smoking.
Business owners have rights to property and free commerce. The smoking ban applies to all business where less than 50 percent of the sales are tobacco products. Clearly, the ban has the prospect of causing some businesses to fail -- especially small business where smoking is a major activity of the clientele.
Requiring 50 percent is arbitrary and unduly high. When a business is barely surviving now, the smoking ban is likely to be a death sentence. The likely losers will be small businesses, such as cigar bars, neighborhood bars and pool rooms. If even one business is destroyed by the ban, it will an injustice.
The best solution would be to allow every business to be either all-smoking or all-non-smoking. Post a sign at the door. Of course, minors should not be allowed inside smoking places. To serve families and minors, most businesses would voluntarily be smoke-free. Would bars and bowling alleys? Some will, some won't.
If non-smoking is good for business, why wouldn't bars and other businesses voluntarily become smoke-free? Why must they be coerced by government?
Judges have the duty to protect our freedoms and rights from those in government who would take them away. Judges Sara Combs and Wilfrid Schroder are not as ignorant as some think.

Thanks, but no thanks
Townhall.com - Neil Cavuto - September 27, 2003 Is it me, or have we become a nation of babies?
We must have, because more than a few of us are quite happy to have the government take care of us. Being the somewhat rebellious chap that I am, I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.
The latest assault on common sense comes from no less than New York Assemblyman Alexander Grannis. The Manhattan Democrat is a perfectly nice guy, with what seems a perfectly nice idea: ban smoking in cars in which there are children.
On the surface, that sounds fine. After all, we know smoking is dangerous. And as a cancer survivor myself, I'm all for getting people to stop smoking. But here's my problem -- that's smokers' call, not the government's.
Uncle Sam can coax you to quit, but he can't force you to quit. There is a difference, and unless we see it, we'll miss it, and be run over by something far more dangerous; an intrusive government that begins manipulating and forcing every detail of our lives.
I mean, think about it. You've got the food police monitoring the burgers we eat, the distraction police spying the cell-phone calls we make, and the language police in some towns counting the public curse words we use. I say, for God's sake, stop it!
Look, I know eating burgers is risky, and smoking is dangerous, and making cell-phone calls on the road isn't a good idea. But when the government starts policing what we do in our cars and potentially what we do in a McDonald's, that's getting a little nutty.
I'm all for good health and good behavior. But again, that's our call, no one else's. When a politician insists he is looking after our own good, I start looking after my own wallet. Laws carry consequences and fines. Laws also often carry taxes and fees . . . all in an effort to police good behavior and penalize bad. We've done it for ages, slapping sin taxes on everything from liquor to cigarettes.
But what's next? Slapping similar taxes on Big Macs? Or BLTs? Or those super-sized value meals?
The bottom and regrettable line is we are a nation of increasingly unhealthy people. But it's not the government's job to make us healthy. And if we start thinking it is, we start accepting more government help. It stands to reason that if we're OK having the government tell us what to do in our cars, we'll be OK having the government tell us what to eat in our kitchens and what to do in our bedrooms.
Gerald Ford was right when he said that a "government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything you have."

FDA regulation of tobacco could be deadly
Townhall.com - Jacob Sullum - September 26, 2003 Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., promises that his bill giving the Food and Drug Administration authority over tobacco products will "save lives." But it could kill people instead.
That's because the bill, which the Senate Health Committee is expected to consider soon, authorizes the FDA to block the introduction of safer tobacco products. In deciding whether to allow a new product on the market, the agency is supposed to weigh "the risks and benefits to the population as a whole." And what the FDA thinks is good for "the population as a whole" is not necessarily what's good for individual consumers.
In addition to the risk reduction offered by a new product, the FDA is supposed to consider whether its availability will discourage current users from quitting or lure new users who otherwise would not have tried tobacco. The upshot is that a demonstrably safer cigarette that smokers would welcome could be rejected because of its anticipated impact on "the population as a whole."
The same collectivist approach is reflected in a provision of the bill that prohibits risk comparisons between different kinds of tobacco products, information that a summary of the legislation calls "inherently misleading." Among other things, this restriction would prevent makers of smokeless tobacco, which is far less hazardous than cigarettes, from informing consumers of that fact.
Opponents of promoting smokeless tobacco as a safer alternative to cigarettes argue that the health benefits of such substitution would be outweighed by the health costs to new users attracted by the risk comparison and to smokers who otherwise would have decided to abstain from tobacco entirely. Given the huge magnitude of the risk reduction involved in switching from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco, this scenario is highly implausible.
In any case, it's wrong to insist that accurate, potentially life-saving information be withheld from consumers because they might not use it the "right" way. In a paper released last February, a leading British anti-smoking activist and five European scientists called this attitude "the health professional's authoritarian insistence that the only valid choice for smokers is to quit or die."
Another way in which Gregg's bill jeopardizes the health of smokers is by authorizing the FDA to order the reduction, or even elimination, of nicotine in cigarettes. Other things being equal, reducing nicotine content increases a smoker's exposure to the toxins and carcinogens in cigarette smoke, making the habit more dangerous.
As critics of "light" cigarettes have been pointing out for years, smokers tend to compensate for a lower nicotine yield by smoking more intensely. To get the nicotine dose they're used to, they take more puffs, inhale more deeply, hold the smoke longer, and cover ventilation holes. As a result, the "tar" intake can be substantially higher than what's indicated by the official rating, which is based on yields measured by machines.
Hence if the FDA orders nicotine reductions in an effort to prevent future smokers from "getting hooked," current smokers will be exposed to greater hazards. From a "public health" perspective, the extra deaths among current smokers would be justified by the deaths prevented because low-nicotine cigarettes attracted fewer new smokers than full-strength cigarettes would have.
All these projections are fraught with uncertainty, of course, because no one really knows how current consumers, let alone future ones, will react to new products or new information. That's one reason individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves which products they want and which information is relevant, with the government's role limited to preventing fraud.
Philip Morris, which supports Gregg's bill partly because it wants to introduce a safer cigarette with the government's blessing, is gambling that it will see eye to eye with the FDA about which products are in the best interests of "the population as a whole." The company's other major reason for supporting the bill is the desire to handicap its competitors through marketing restrictions and regulatory burdens, thereby protecting its position as the leading cigarette manufacturer.
The measure also has the backing of tobacco farmers and their representatives in Congress, because they've been promised $15 billion or so in taxpayer-funded bribes euphemistically described as crop quota "buyouts." Depending upon the final details, the legislation may even be endorsed by anti-smoking activists, who have long demanded FDA regulation of tobacco.
If so, the only people who won't get what they want (aside from Philip Morris's competitors) will be consumers. The FDA will see to that.

The New Prohibition
CNSNews.com - Sterling Rome - September 24, 2003 When I went after New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg earlier this year for his anti-smoking legislation, some friends asked me why I got so worked up about the issue when I no longer lived in New York - and don't even smoke.
I explained that the issue wasn't whether or not smoking is unhealthy (it is), but how many of our freedoms we are going to surrender to elitist politicians that feel entitled to decide what is and is not "good for us" and then enact legislation to criminalize or otherwise dictate our behavior?
When asked about the smoking ban in New York City, Bloomberg said he hated smoking. What if he hated bathing? It shows a level of caprice among elected officials better suited to a dictatorship than a representative democracy.
It was only a few months after New York's ban that the state of Connecticut enacted the same legislation and has now decided to outlaw smoking in bars and restaurants - effectively forcing smokers into the street, where I am sure you have already seen them.
How hypocritical is it that the same state governments that lined up to get their "fair share" of the bogus and ridiculously big tobacco settlements, and then taxed cigarettes inordinately to raise money for state coffers have now banned smoking. Many of them, including New York, are so dim-witted as not to realize that a huge tax on cigarettes will do little to raise money if you then ban their use.
Yet many of these politicians ultimately see such legislation as a success. After all, they do not care if people are humiliated by having to go stand in the rain to enjoy a cigarette because they get to preen and cluck about all the good they have done "for the community." As a survivor of the World Trade Center attacks and knowing first hand all the work that's needed as a result of it, I find it fascinating that the mayor of New York City could not find anything better to focus his attention on.
But Bloomberg is not alone. Here in Connecticut, where I moved after 9/11, we have Attorney General Richard Blumenthal who is so desperate to decide what is good for the rest of us he has spent his time in office wasting our state tax dollars on moronic lawsuits like the one against Oracle for attempting a merger; or the one against the Bush administration for 'global warming;' or even one against the makers of the George Foreman Grill.
Since Blumenthal has effectively been running for governor from his office for a number of years now, take a long look at him and imagine the kind of legislation he would enact given the chance. Like Bloomberg, Blumenthal assumes that he knows what is best for us, whether we like it or not.
Since arrogance and ignorance are so commonly displayed by our political elites, it is clear that the ban on smoking is just the beginning. There is already serious consideration of a "fat tax" on foods that politicians decide aren't good for us, and litigation is already underway across the country against food companies for allegedly making people fat.
Why not? After all, the states were able to secure billions of dollars from the tobacco industry for convincing juries that cigarettes can make you smoke them, so why not make the argument that Twinkies can do the same?
The dumbing-down of the public into accepting the premise that there is no such thing as free will or personal accountability might allow for more jackpot jury awards, but it also sows the seeds for nanny-state legislation like the smoking ban - and worse.
Because the political will of the people is so often obstructed by the manipulation of the legislative branch these days, it is not important whether the 'facts' behind legislation are true, only that a court decrees that they are. For big government, nanny-state proponents this offers an irresistible way of changing the laws without actually having to pass them.
Now just in case you're like my friends who thought I was making too much of all this, let me make you aware of the newest advisory from the National Research Council. A few days ago the Council urged Congress and state legislatures to raise taxes on alcohol, most especially beer, to discourage underage drinking. This advisory was heralded by special interest groups including Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Certainly, no one wants to encourage underage drinking, but if you don't think that this suggested tax is just the beginning of legislation against alcohol, recall the price of a pack of cigarettes just a decade ago.
By embracing the victim culture that many of our elites have offered us we have been duped into believing that they really care about us, while they really care about little more than creating a society fashioned in their own image. That the public might be outraged or inconvenienced by their decisions means nothing to them, as they are cocksure in their enlightenment, and our need to be disciplined.
There will soon be nowhere to go to smoke in Connecticut. If our elites have their way there will be nowhere to eat a Twinkie, or drink a beer, either. Apparently, our elected officials and their cronies believe that we should spend our lives working, or running on a treadmill, or "multi-tasking" and doing both.
Those of us who choose to smoke, eat fatty food, or drink beer can't possibly be doing so because we are adults and can make our own decisions; we must be addicted, depressed, stupid, or all of the above. This begs the question of what Richard Blumenthal might decide he hates - besides the George Foreman Grill, of course.

First tobacco, now fat
Townhall.com - Bruce Bartlett - September 23, 2003 In Seattle, there is a popular restaurant called the 5 Spot. Its signature dish is a huge, calorie-laden dessert called The Bulge. Access to it, however, is restricted to those patrons willing to sign a waiver agreeing not to sue the restaurant for making them fat.
Although obviously a marketing gimmick, the underlying issue is no joke. Greedy lawyers (pardon the redundancy) have been working steadily on a campaign to make restaurants and food manufacturers legally liable for the spread of obesity. Sadly, they are making progress.
In June, the Public Health Advocacy Institute in Boston held a conference on legal approaches to the obesity epidemic. More than 100 lawyers and "consumer advocates" (i.e., left-wing busybodies) heard from prominent veterans of tobacco lawsuits on how to duplicate their success. The goal of the attendees is to make themselves multimillionaires while pretending that their motive is a high-minded concern for public health. It would be laughable if it hadn't already worked so well with the tobacco companies, which not coincidentally, also own many food operations.
Unfortunately, the tobacco companies seem to have learned nothing from their experience with anti-smoking zealots and are actually opening the door to lawsuits against their food divisions. They don't seem to understand that their enemies are not driven by genuine concerns about health or even by greed, but by ideology. They bring a religious fervor to their efforts that combine a Marxist hatred of capitalism with extraordinary naivete about human nature, mixed together with a tort liability system that is eager to award large damages based on the flimsiest of evidence.
Nevertheless, Kraft Foods, a division of Altria Group (formerly known as tobacco giant Philip Morris), thinks it can buy off its prosecutors by cutting portion sizes, reducing fat and sugar in its products, and scaling back marketing to children. These may all be worthwhile things to do, but to its enemies it is virtually an admission of guilt. Just as warning labels on cigarettes proved to be no defense against tobacco lawsuits, neither will Kraft's pre-emptive capitulation. It will only embolden its enemies and provide new lines of legal attack.
The trick that the lawyers play is to start with very reasonable-sounding demands, such as better and clearer nutritional labeling. Then, when labeling is agreed to, they will pick it apart and make deceptive advertising the basis for litigation. John Banzhaf, a leader in litigation against food and tobacco companies, signaled this strategy shortly after the Kraft announcement, saying that it was improperly using adult nutrition guidelines for children's food. And should Kraft put forward guidelines just for children, Banzhaf will no doubt find new problems with them and also demand separate guidelines for women, the elderly, blacks, gays and any other group in society that would make a sympathetic plaintiff.
The lawyers are also pursuing other avenues of litigation that parallel those used against tobacco companies. For example, they heavily promote studies showing that the negative health effects of obesity are equal to those for smoking, and others claiming that fat and sugar are as addictive as nicotine. It doesn't matter how dubious this research is. The lawyers know from experience that they can easily bamboozle uninformed and undereducated jurors with it, and that timid judges seldom throw out even the shabbiest "scientific studies."
The big problem for the lawyers is that most people don't blame anyone except themselves for being overweight, according to a Wirthlin poll in May. A Gallup poll in July found 89 percent of Americans opposed holding fast food restaurants legally liable for diet-related health problems.
Overcoming such resistance will be hard and take time. That is why a public relations campaign is an essential part of the lawyers' legal strategy. This is being waged through a rash of new books blaming the food industry -- and only the food industry -- for all the woes associated with obesity. These include Marion Nestle's "Food Politics" and Greg Critser's "Fat Land." The latest is "Food Fight" by Yale professor Kelly Brownell, one of the first to call for new taxes on fattening foods to discourage their consumption.
At the same time, the lawyers will explore other potential avenues for litigation. Schools are one target, because they serve fattening food in their cafeterias and often provide vending machines with high calorie sodas and candy. Suburban sprawl has also been fingered as a cause of obesity, because it forces people to drive rather than walk to their destinations. This opens up the possibility of litigation against local governments over zoning. There is even the possibility of suing pet food manufacturers for making our cats and dogs fat. Lest you laugh, the prestigious National Research Council recently issued a 450-page report on pet obesity.
Congress should put a stop to this before it goes any further.

The campaign against underage drinking targets adults
Townhall.com - Jacob Sullum - September 12, 2003 The NAS committee concedes that "a causal link between alcohol advertising and underage alcohol use has not been clearly established." But it says the possibility of a connection means that "alcohol companies should refrain from displaying commercial messages encouraging alcohol use to audiences known to include a significant number of children or teens when these messages are known to be highly attractive to young people."
Acknowledging the constitutional problems with trying to impose such restrictions by force, the NAS committee settles for the threat of force. "In the event that the industry fails to respond satisfactorily to this challenge," the report warns, "the case for government action might become more compelling."
Only if you think the government is justified in prohibiting messages because it worries how people will respond to them. Assuming that teenagers drink more than they would in the absence of advertising (a doubtful proposition), we are still talking about speech, which should be countered not with force but with more speech -- from parents, from teachers, even from activists like George Hacker.
Advertising restrictions are not the only way in which the agenda laid out in the NAS report would impinge upon the rights of adults. The committee also recommends higher alcohol taxes, suggesting that the levy on beer should be tripled.
More fundamentally, raising alcohol prices to deter underage drinking is like raising the cost of tickets for R-rated movies to deter 13-year-olds who sneak in without the requisite parent or guardian. In both cases, the appropriate solution is to enforce the age restriction, not to punish responsible adults for the misbehavior of other people's kids.

Second-hand Smoke is Harmful to Science
Michael Fumento - September 11, 2003 Looking for a surer method of being ripped apart than entering a lion's den covered with catnip? Conduct the most exhaustive, longest-running study on second-hand smoke and death. Find no connection. Then rather than being PC and hiding your data in a vast warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, publish it in one of the world's most respected medical journals.
That's what research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook discovered last May. That's when they reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no "causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and tobacco-related mortality," adding, however "a small effect" can't be ruled out.
At this writing there have been over 140 responses on www.bmj.com, and if made into a movie they would be called "The Howling." Many are mere slurs several grades below even sophomoric.
Some demanded the BMJ retract the study because, as one put it, the "tobacco industry will use it." (It didn't). Another made the rather draconian call to ban all use of statistics in science, lest they be put to such wicked purposes as this.
"It is astounding how much of the criticism springs from (personal attacks) rather than from scientific criticism of the study itself," observed one of the few supportive writers. Said another: "As a publisher of the leading Austrian medical online news service, I feel quite embarrassed following the debate on this article. Many postings look more like a witch hunt than a scientific debate."
Sadly, one of the most pathetic responses came from Dr. Michael Thun, vice president for epidemiology and surveillance research at the American Cancer Society. The ACS started the study and formerly collaborated with the authors. Thun claimed that since there was so much exposure to smokers back in the 1950s and 1960s that essentially everybody was a second-hand smoker.
This logic puts the wife of a two-pack-a-day husband in the same category as somebody who once stumbled into a smoky bar. It negates all ETS studies based on spousal exposure including those serving Thun's purposes. But based on the subjects' own recollection decades later in the UCLA study, spousal smoking was indeed a good indicator of their total exposure to second-hand smoke.
One refrain running through the attacks is, "Why take seriously a study that contradicts what everyone already knows?" But "what everyone knows" is wrong. It's the UCLA study that's very much in the majority.
A 1999Environmental Health Perspectives survey of 17 ETS-heart disease studies found only five that were statistically significantly positive. ("Statistical significance" refers to whether an increased or decreased risk falls outside the bounds of what could be expected by chance.) The lead author? Why, Michael Thun!
Likewise, a 2002 analysis of 48 studies regarding a possible ETS link to lung cancer found 10 that were significantly positive, one that was actually significantly negative, and 37 that like Enstrom and Kabat's were insignificant either way.
The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while ETS may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 - when having smoked obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. In scientific terminology, that's called a "tiny amount."
Unable to find significant faults in the UCLA study itself, critics repeatedly harped on what Enstrom and Kabat had clearly stated – that some of the funding was from the tobacco industry. As they explained, this became necessary when the University of California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, which was specifically set up to support this type of research, stopped their funding and no other sources were available.
The big bucks go to those who "discover" that ETS causes everything from pimples to piles. Both governmental and private organizations have directed tens of millions of dollars to groups promoting ETS as a killer, perhaps even a greater killer than active smoking! Meanwhile Big Tobacco has essentially extinguished its efforts on ETS, reserving new spending and political capital for other fights.
So give the BMJ and Enstrom and Kabat an "F" for political correctness. But give them an "A" for honesty and courage.

Michael Fumento is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute.
Disclaimer: Neither Michael Fumento nor the Hudson Institute
receive money from tobacco interests.

Click it or ticket
Townhall.com - Walter E. Williams - September 10, 2003 Imagine you're having a backyard barbeque. A cop walks in and announces, "This is a random health and safety check to see whether you've removed the skin from the chicken before you served it." Though delicious in taste, we all know that chicken skin contains considerable unhealthy fat. If you're caught serving chicken skin, the cop gets your ID and issues you a $50 ticket.
If something like this were to occur, most Americans -- I hope -- would see such an action as ludicrous, offensive and a gross violation of our liberties. But not so fast. Let's think about it. Each year, obesity claims the lives of 300,000 Americans and adds over $100 billion to health-care costs. Doesn't that give government the right to dictate what we eat? If you're the least offended by the notion of government dictating our diets, pray tell me how it differs in principle from seatbelt laws and especially the new federal enforcement program called "Click It or Ticket."
Under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the federal government is spending $500 million to aggressively enforce seatbelt laws. According to a July Consumers Research article written by Eric Peters titled "The Federal Government Wants You to Buckle Up," about 11,000 law enforcement agencies across the country have set up random checkpoints and have issued hundreds of thousands of tickets to unbelted drivers and passengers.
Just as in my barbeque scenario, their justification is our health and safety. After all, the 2002 highway death toll was 42,815 and, according to a U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study, "The Economic Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes on America's Roadways," seatbelt usage could have prevented an estimated 9,200 fatalities.
"Click It or Ticket" represents another bold step along the road to serfdom. History knows of no totalitarianism agenda where noble goals weren't used as justification. Nazis used "for the good of the German Volk" and the Soviets used "for the good of the proletariat" as their justification. Health and safety have become the American justification for attacks on liberty.
In a free society, each person owns himself. As such, he has the broad discretion to make his own choices regardless of what others think of the wisdom of his choices. He has the right to take chances with his own health and safety. However, if an American doesn't own himself, and it's Congress that owns him, he doesn't have those rights. Thus, the "Click It or Ticket" program is simply Congress' way of caring for its property, the American people.
Whether seatbelt usage is a good idea is beside the point, for daily exercise, nutritious meals, eight hours sleep, and cultural and intellectual enrichment might also be good ideas. The point is whether government has a right to coerce us into taking care of ourselves.
If eating what we wish is our business and not that of government, then why should we accept government's coercing us to wear seatbelts? America's tyrants might answer, "We just haven't gotten around to dictating diets yet."
Some might argue, but falsely so, that the problem with people exercising their liberty to drive without seatbelts, ride motorcycles without helmets or eat in unhealthy ways is that if they become injured or sick, society will be burdened with higher health-care costs. That's not a problem of liberty but one of socialism.
There's no liberty-based argument for forcing one person to care for the needs of another. Under socialism, one is obliged to care for another. A parent-child relationship emerges between the citizen and the government. That was not the vision of our Founders.

Smoke screen/ Smoking ban proponents use government to force their beliefs on the rest of us
The Gazette; Colorado Springs, Colo. - September 8, 2003 How's this for irony: a diplomat from a country that spent most of the past century under a system that didn't recognize private property has a better grasp of the concept than some politicians in the western United States, a region supposedly known for holding the individual above the government. That was the situation on Sept. 2 in two unrelated yet similar situations.
In order to align the United Nations with New York City's ban on smoking in public places and protect employees from second-hand smoke, Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a directive that "no smoking shall be permitted in any of the United Nations premises." There seems to be some dispute over whether the powers that be can force diplomats to abide by the decree.
As Russian U.N. Ambassador Sergey Lavrov made his way to the Delegate's Lounge for a nicotine fix Tuesday, he observed that the secretary general "doesn't own this building," an obvious reference to the concept of private property rights and the idea that an owner should make decisions regarding the use of his property.
Although the U.N. building in Manhattan isn't owned by an individual, the ambassador's comment shows he understands that owners, not some bureaucrat, should make such decisions.
Here in the fiercely independent West, that concept isn't so clear. Greeley's City Council opted to let voters decide if they want to tell property owners whether they can allow smoking in their businesses. That didn't sit well with smoking ban proponents who wanted the council to act immediately to curtail owners' property rights. One former smoker and former council member backing a smoking ban told the council that its members had taken an oath to protect citizens. What about the citizens whose rights are being trampled?
Regardless of the motives of ban supporters, using the power of government to force business owners to bend to their will is a misuse of government and not to be taken lightly. And putting a smoking ban to a public vote doesn't change the concept; majorities don't have the right to step on the rights of their fellow citizens.
We've heard the arguments before: it's a health issue, employees don't always have the option of working elsewhere, I shouldn't have to breathe smoke while my family and I are eating dinner, and the list goes on. What these arguments ignore is that where we work, dine and spend our time are all matters of personal choice. If we're not happy with our choices, we are free to make fresh ones; that's the beauty of our system.
Those who would use government to force business owners to comply with their idea of what's good for people are taking a short cut to their objective. If they want smoke-free dining they should work together on an information campaign to try to sway businesses to their way of thinking. They could work with employees to help them change the environment in their workplaces. Business owners make policy according to the bottom line and they'll change if they see that line changing in a bad way.
Employees who feel trapped in a job at a business that allows smoking can rally like-minded employees and customers to lobby the business owner to change the policy. Customers are free to patronize other establishments whose policies are more to their liking. If enough of them do, or if an owner can't get enough employees, he or she will rethink the policy. Rather than using the power of government, proponents would do better using the power of the dollar to create the change they're seeking. That's their right in a free society and a free market. Forcing change through government action is anathema to both.

One Non-Smoker's View Of Foolish Non-Smoking Law
Niagra Falls Reporter - Frank Thomas Croisdale - September 2003 If it really was about me, then it's just not working.
The new smoking ban in bars, that is. I'm among the demographic of non-smokers that was supposed to flood the New York State bar scene once the cigarette smoke was removed. Of course, it hasn't happened and never will.
In truth, I would have spoken sooner in these pages on this topic, save the fact that my good friends and colleagues, Mike Hudson and David Staba, hit it harder and more repeatedly than Lizzie Borden whacked her parents with that axe. Of course that fact surprises no one who knows Hudson and Staba. Besides writing the lion's share of the columns appearing in the Reporter, there is nothing else that those two put more effort into than sitting at a bar swilling the sauce and smoking cigarettes.
Far from being nonproductive members of society, however, Hudson and Staba simply engage in a prerequisite for a successful newspaperman -- gathering information at the source of most tips and leads.
I offer you these words as proof of that fact:
"Within a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States except The Christian Science Monitor, there is a saloon haunted by reporters, a saloon which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium and sometimes as a home.
"A saloonkeeper is useful to a reporter because he can be interviewed about anything. This is an example: If a war breaks out anywhere in the world, an idea for a local story always takes form in the frenzied brain of the feature editor, and the idea is always the same. If the war is between Italy and Ethiopia, for instance, the idea is, 'How do the Italians in New York City feel about the war?' When a reporter is assigned to such a story he goes on a hurried tour of the gin mills in the nearest Italian neighborhood and in his story each saloonkeeper is identified as a 'community leader.'"
Mike Hudson or David Staba could easily have penned the words above, but it should not shock you to learn that they are excerpts from Joseph Mitchell's 1938 book, "My Ears Are Bent." Mitchell spent over 60 years in the newspaper game, writing for such legendary papers as the Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram, as well as serving as the elder statesman for "The New Yorker."
The point is that reporters have always penned the top stories in each newspaper perched atop a barstool, and that is why I don't write the hard news pieces for this paper -- I'm far too dry to be qualified. Which brings me back to where we jumped off together -- the smoking ban.
According to the drafters of this nonsensical piece of legislation, the ban was put into effect to do two things -- protect the health of non-smoking bartenders and barmaids and draw folks to taverns that had heretofore stayed away because of the threat of second-hand smoke. The good news for the puff-free bartenders and barmaids is that they no longer need run the risk of breathing in unwanted second-hand smoke. The bad news is that most of them are now unemployed, due to the fact that most barstools haven't seen a fanny since the new law went into effect.
As a lifelong non-drinker and non-smoker, I feel most qualified to comment on the effect that the law has had on the second group of people that legislators thought they were protecting when they voted "aye" on this resolution. In the 12 months leading up to the ban, I visited a drinking establishment a total of five times. Once was at the Reporter's annual party, held at Misty's in the Days Inn Riverview, and the other four times were to chat with Hudson and Staba at the newspaper's sub-office, housed inside the Press Box. Since the ban became effective, I've not been to a bar even once.
I am quite sure that I won't go to one either, at least not until the tourism season slows down and I have time to commiserate with my two boon companions. The fact that cigarettes are now verboten doesn't make saloons any more appealing to me -- in fact, it makes them less so. As my wife -- who has quit and restarted smoking more times than a California forest fire -- says, "Drinking and smoking just go together."
From a non-smoker, acute-observer-of-people point of view, I must confess that I enjoy watching folks smoke at a bar. With educated, engaging and articulate speakers like Hudson and Staba, the cigarette becomes almost an extension of themselves, used to accentuate points with a flourish -- much like the panache demonstrated by a baton-wielding maestro. A bar without cigarettes is like a bar without alcohol -- pointless.
Anyone who fancies himself a skilled observer of the local scene could have told the politicians that the smoking ban was a bad idea. It was just a few years ago that a jazz club opened on the corner of Third and Main streets. The owners did a wonderful job of restoring and decorating the building. They lined up top-quality jazz acts and spent a small fortune in advertising.
All seemed well, except for one not-so-minor detail. The club would be a non-smoking, non-alcohol venue that specialized in coffee. The out-of-business signs were on the windows within three months.
Howard Stern once did an interview with saxophonist Brandon Marsalis, just as the jazz great was considering leaving his gig as musical director of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Marsalis told Stern that people in the jazz community were telling him that he was selling out by doing the show.
"I want you to repeat after me," Stern told Marsalis. "Jazz music minus 'The Tonight Show' equals welfare."
Marsalis didn't listen, left the show, and hasn't been heard of on the national stage since. In the case of the local jazz club, the math could have been described like this:
Jazz Club - Booze and Cigarettes = Bankruptcy.
None of these things are the reason that I wrote this column, however. The real reason that I am tackling this smoking ban issue in print goes by the name of Kathy Magliarditi. Last week Kathy asked me this question, "If I send you something will you write about it in the paper?"
"Depends what it is," I responded.
"Oh, you'll like it -- a lot," she answered.
Turns out she was right. The "it" that she referred to was a Web page entitled "My Smoker's Rights" at mysmokersrights.rjrt.com. If you go to the site and click on the New York State section, you'll find some very interesting information on the incredible impact that smokers make on our state's economy.
For instance, take a look at this information:
New York's excise tax per pack of cigarettes: $1.50
New York's excise tax collection for the fiscal year ending June 2002: $1,066,093,000
Sales tax on tobacco products: 4 percent
Local tax on tobacco products: $28,100,000
Federal excise tax per pack of cigarettes: $0.39
Total federal excise tax collections in fiscal year 2002: $7,512,700,000
Keep in mind that our state is reeling financially -- to the point where Gov. George Pataki has put considerable pressure on legislators to find ways to generate income in their districts. When you have a sin tax that is generating over a billion dollars in yearly revenue, with very little complaint from those paying it, why in the world would you want to pass a law that would target the very place where most smokers prefer to light up?
The site also goes on to say that of the $4.72 average price of a pack of brand-name cigarettes, $2.63 -- or 56 percent -- goes to New York State taxes. Again, why fool with a golden cash cow like that?
If you think that drinkers could pick up the slack should people smoke less due to the ban, think again. According to R.J. Reynolds, 197.5 six-packs of beer or 400.6 bottles of wine must be sold to equal the amount of excise tax generated with the sale of just one carton of cigarettes.
The bottom line is that smokers in New York State pay the highest rate of tax for their habit of anyone in the nation. As a non-smoker, I'd like to say, "Thanks." Far from being happy about this ban, I want you to know that I'm going to lobby for not only a return to smoking in bars, but on airplanes as well. For any group that brings over $1 billion to a cash-poor state that would otherwise be slashing my services and raising my taxes, I say, smoke 'em if you've got 'em -- then smoke a few more.
This law has been an unmitigated economic disaster on three levels.
It's put thousands of bar workers on the unemployment line -- further taxing an already overburdened program. It's caused less cigarettes to be smoked because people are no longer sitting at the bar going through a pack or two, thus putting a hit on the excise tax numbers.
Finally, it's hurt the Quick Draw game revenue, because when the bars are empty, there is no one left to bet on the keno draw. It is only a matter of time before these economic concerns force lawmakers to concede that the law was passed in error and vote to return smoking to the state's inns, taverns and saloons.
For anyone running for re-election in November, they better hope that that day comes sooner rather than later, because smokers are red-hot over their loss of rights, and a politician's hope for another term may just go up in smoke.

What is the movie industry smoking?
The Daily Journal - Andrew Lisa - August 30, 2003 Surgeon General's Warning: Ruining the last enjoyable things on the planet because of a perceived danger to other people's children is hazardous to my ability not to commit suicide.
First, the lid to my Advil bottle became a Rubik's Cube because parents were too stupid to use the top shelf in the medicine cabinet. Then, they said I had to go to a porn shop to buy the Swimsuit Issue because a woman in a bikini could scar the eyes of someone's precious little helmet-wearing child.
I'm being told my junk food options should be reigned in because Little Fatty's zombie parents think exercise is Prozac and a 56K modem.
And now, the last bastion of escape -- cinema -- is under the gun because it's not fulfilling its God-given obligation to make sure kids don't smoke.
Twenty-four attorneys general recently wrote a letter to the president of the Motion Picture Association of America and said studies have shown that "simply by reducing the depiction of smoking in movies, the industry can protect our nation's youth from the known perils of smoking."
First of all, we get it. Smoking is bad. Can we move on?
But more importantly, it's not the MPAA's job to protect our nation's youth. Its job is to put out decent movies, which it can't do because of the obnoxious legions of child-advocacy groups that place the blame of parental shortcomings on everyone but the parents.
I'm sick of having to curtail my life to build a bubble around your children. It's senseless.
But who needs sense when we have studies? All we need is a study done by any back-alley group with an acronym for a title and we'll run around like a bunch of lunatics ranting that the world will end if we don't get those trans-fatty acids. Well, you people are on acid.
Chocolate isn't good. Chocolate is good.
Drink wine. Don't drink wine. No, only drink red wine.
Jog. No, walk.
Eat carbohydrates. No, only eat raw meat and burgers without the buns, and then force this insanity on the rest of the world to protect the kids.
What about the kids? Look at what they're doing to the kids! The kids, the kids, the kids!
I don't care about your stupid kids. Truth be told, I don't care if teenagers smoke or don't smoke. If he's not bothering me, what a kid does is the business of two people: his parents. Their life is over. Mine isn't, and I want to live it.
I paid $8 to see "Pearl Harbor" and it could have been a great movie. But it was contrived and cheesy and unrealistic because 1940s military personnel couldn't be seen smoking cigarettes and kamikaze airplane attacks couldn't involve blood and gore.
Why? Because of the kids.
And that's not to say that I don't like kids. I do. I just don't want to raise them. That's why I don't have any.
Look, I'm sorry you're in child Hell. I'm sorry that upon giving birth, you stopped being the most important person in your own life. But does the rest of the world have to absorb your parental misery? Do I have to burn in child Hell with you?
Parenting is a tough job, and a whole lot of you clearly don't want to handle it. But don't say it's the MPAA's obligation to do your parenting for you and concern itself with what your kid weighs, who he sleeps with or what he smokes instead of confronting your own parental inadequacies.
I don't care about your kid's welfare enough to stomach watered-down movies. That's why they have a rating system.
Stop for a second with the bumper sticker that tells your kid the world wants to know whether or not he made honor roll and try to understand that we don't. And the sooner you realize it's not the world's job to clean up the mess you created, the sooner you'll understand it's not Hollywood's fault you're having a hard time convincing your 15-year-old not to drink while she's pregnant.
I remember being a kid. It was pretty awful. I always had two giant people standing over me telling me I couldn't eat junk food whenever I wanted, I couldn't linger in my room like a spider all day in front of a computer, I couldn't stay out until whenever I wanted, and that I wasn't allowed to watch movies that people smoked in.
It was called parenting, and you should give it a try because your kids are going to grow up to be awful adults.
And that does affect me.

Up in smoke: tobacco lovers rights ignored
The Chronicle (CT) - Terese Karmel - August 28, 2003 If they are still smoking — despite the surgeon general’s warnings and all of the lawsuits that have come and gone trying to drain the resources (read punish) of R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco giants — then I must presume those who still smoke are of sound mind, are aware of the risks to their health and are simply exercising their free will.
Just as I chose to go on airplanes or cross a busy intersection or drive 70 mph on a highway.
The last time I checked, we still live in a society that allows these kinds of choices, regardless of the risks. As for second-hand smoke, well, exhaust from busses and trucks make me cough and airline engines roar over my home day and night, but hey, that’s the price of living in a community.
The country’s various governmental agencies have enacted so much legislation protecting those who complain about smoke in a bar (in a bar, for God’s sake, we’re not talking about church, here) that it’s quite possible that the trade off has been to deny smokers their rights to choose their quality of life.
In effect, government has relegated smokers to the class of victims without crimes, or to use a more politically correct (or incorrect) expression, second class citizens. In today’s society, they are the lepers of the past.
Government and society, in general, has done this through blanket legislation that rejects everyone who lights up a cigarette (a significant percentage of society — and not just older people with lifelong habits — more on that later) so that those who don’t smoke are protected 100 percent while those who do are denied equal protection. Is that any way to be a government for the people, by the people? Surely there are compromises: sections in bars and restaurants set aside for smokers and in public buildings seemed to do the job for years; why all of a sudden is that not a fair solution?
Recently I taught a class of college students that met for more than three hours a week in the afternoon. At least half of my students used the 15-minute break to grab a smoke while the rest of us munched on potato chips and chocolate candy — both equally or more detrimental to our health (I’ve never heard of second hand fat). My point here is that despite the warnings and at least two generations of anti-smoking legislation and attitudes, people (and not just old timers) are still lighting up because for whatever reason, that’s what they want to do to themselves.
And now the anti-smoke battalion is making in-roads into Europe.
On Jan. 1, Ireland will become the first European country to ban smoking in pubs. I can’t imagine the pubcrawlers in Dublin or, as I’m sure will happen, in London, being unable to enjoy a cigarette while they drink their Guinness on tap. It doesn’t take many visits to either of these countries (and to the heart of their social scene — their pubs) to realize that young people have failed to heed the warnings (probably because their parents haven’t either). They smoke by the carloads. I’m not arguing that it’s a good thing; of course, it’s better to keep your lungs clear of nicotine and other damaging chemicals. But again, faced with a choice, many smokers seem to persist in their habit. And choice is the point here.
In this country, bar owners, especially in New York, and I suspect in October in Connecticut, are going nuts because they have lost business and those smokers who still drop by are making a mess of their entrances with cigarette butts and ashes, forcing them to hire clean-up people. One bar owner told me he’s had more than enough people blowing off their tabs by using the excuse of stepping outside to light up.
Passing legislation such as this or increasing sales tax on cigarettes are no more successful deterrents to smoking as are beefed up penalties for murder. In Connecticut, the tax on cigarettes (a whopping $1.11 on a pack of 20) is at least a quarter of the total cost.
Recently I was on a tour of a new area building with a small group of people, none of whom I had a personal relationship with. At one point, I asked one of my guides what a small room was to be used for. Another member of the party quickly offered a possibility: “Ugh,” she said. “That’s for the smokers.”
The disgust with which the remark was made might well have been said about a rapist or an axe murderer. Later I wondered if any of the other members of the group were either smokers or were intimate with smokers and if so, how offended they might have been by the remark. Would it be any less offensive to have said “This room is for people with curly hair or who have black skin.”
This “holier than thou” attitude is most pronounced by those who have had the will power or luck, or both, to have kicked the habit. Good for them. I know how hard it is.
But the fact that I succeeded in giving up smoking does not give me license to accost total strangers (or acquaintances for that matter) who I happen to be standing behind in a Dairy Mart while they are buying a pack of Marlboros with “You really shouldn’t be doing that” or “Don’t you know you’re polluting the air for other people?” This, I am told by smokers, happens with too much regularity.
Would you tell a total stranger that her hair is a mess or he has a spot on his shirt?
As far as I know, despite shortages of other vital commodities, there is still plenty of air to go around. Especially in open air venues, like baseball stadiums or race tracks where people are forced to crowd into small stairways to smoke — completely, by the way, blocking them in the event of a real emergency.
Racetracks are really a strange place to prohibit smoking. As a colleague of mine pointed out, at least cigarette smoke covers up the odor of the horse dung.
But, perhaps, the whole issue was put into perspective by a recent New Yorker cartoon in