I second everything my colleague, Professor Schaff, says in his strong post on tobacco and abortion. Regarding the demise of the "no smoking in bars" bill, I would note a stronger contradiction than the one that Professor Schaff mentions.
Secondhand smoke is by far the lesser of the two public safety problems created by your local watering hole. Allowing public establishments to serve alcohol to people who have cars parked outside is going to kill people on a regular basis. There are more than 16,000 fatalities due to drunk driving every year, and I am guessing that almost all of the drunks who got behind the wheel and killed themselves and other folks got snonkered at a bar or a restaurant that serves alcohol. So why not just prohibit serving alcohol altogether? If there was a bill before the state legislature to that effect, I missed it.
The United States has a strong element of puritanism left over in its political culture, an element altogether detached from its religious roots. Anyone who has visited Europe (or at least, England), knows how much looser our cousins over there are about cigarettes and whiskey. When I visited London in 1988 everyone smoked. Even the babies. America, by contrast, is almost a tobacco free zone. But why are we willing to place restrictions on public smoking that we won't place on public drinking, which is obviously the more serious danger? The answer is that our policies have little to do with a rational estimation of public safety, and everything to do with political culture.
The answer is that, at some point, cigarette smoking became one of those things that distinguishes upper class culture from not so upper class culture. When my daughter was born in California I noticed that virtually none of the hospital doctors, x-ray technicians, etc., smoked. Virtually all of the nurses did. Very few of my colleagues at Northern smoke cigarettes, but almost all of the construction workers who built our new Tech Center lit up whenever they got the chance. In America, cigarette smoking is the most visible distinction between the elect and the lesser folks. This is neo-puritanism.
This is mostly a good thing. It reduces smoking in general, but it works largely by moral persuasion. Maybe we should leave it at that. Liberty means letting other people do things that you and I don't approve of. By all means educate the public about the dangers of smoking. But let free adults make what they will of their education.
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