A tendentious article in the tabloid Washington Examiner – so upscale and establishment-bound that it is delivered free only in certain ZIP codes – makes a front-page headline claim today that “Indoor bans don’t stop smoking’s toll.”
The evidence for this remarkable claim is a report by the International Union Against Cancer that tobacco may kill 1 billion people in the 21st century. Of course, that is a global figure and based on current trends. Even if smoking rates went down, so many people are being born, there are going to be more smokers and, thus, more cancer.
The article cited as further proof that smoking bans don’t work the opinion of a local politician that “There’s very little federal and state governments can do to control people’s habits.” That pol may have been riding his motorcycle too long without a helmet, driving too far without a seatbelt or too busy groping someone to realize that governments every day do and should do things to control people’s habits.
The tobacco companies are sued, shamed and shunned at home so they have to sell their products in other countries; that is what the dire billion-dead prediction is really all about. As well as about restaurant owners who are so bad at business they fear failing if they give patrons what they want – no smoking.
A person may be free to smoke and cause himself cancer, but in an indoor venue everyone is exposed. A smoker has other options, such as chewing tobacco, in a no-smoking restaurant if he desires to get the awful taste and addictive nicotine in his body that badly. However, if you chew tobacco no one else can see how “cool” you are, and that’s probably the main reason people want to be able smoke cigarettes anywhere they want to without any regard to the well-being, safety, and freedom of others.
Listen. If you want to goto a restaurant(Freedom), then you can go. If I want to goto a restaurant, then I can go. It is a PRIVATE business. This means, it has been established by a private citizen, for whatever reason.
Your position is to stop the smoker, and the bar owner from their choice, so that the non-smoker can go into any place in the bar.
What the hell kind of nonsense is that logic, when you’ve got cars which spew a billion times more noxious, carcinogenic fumes into the air? Get real.
What’s really happening is that you are trying to take individual choice away from the people. You and your kind should have YOUR freedom taken away.
I believe the only solution to reduce the cancer pandemic is to kill off massive segments of the global population.
you a fascist?