I used to think so too, until I quit smoking three years ago and know really just how invasive is really is.
I just stopped reading right there. There are
no people on earth more antagonistic to smokers than the people who used to be smokers. They had their fun and decided to quit, so now they think they're qualified to tell everybody else to quit.
Less flippantly, former smokers are extremely sensitive to the smell of smoke. Mrs. Fraggle used to smoke. Today she will climb over twelve rows of seats in a theater to tell somebody to put out his cigarette--a cigarette I didn't even know was there! (Well thirty years ago anyway. Today you don't often encounter smoking in theaters anymore.)
The lightbulb moment came not a week after I quit, when, on the drive home from work, I realized I could smell people's cigarette smoke from other vehicles. This may sound like the most obvious thing ever, but I had literally never noticed it until I quit. Most likely because my sense of smell was no longer dulled by my pack-a-day habit. Now, if I have my windows open, I can smell the smoke from passers by, or neighbors who step out for a puff.
No. You just don't get it. Your senses have been attuned to the smell of tobacco because you spent your whole life teaching your central nervous system that tobacco is a pleasure. The rest of us don't have that problem. Please don't assume that because you're now a crusading nanny that the rest of us must be too. Personally I don't give a flying fuck about smoking, but I do care about freedom and I don't like to see it abridged.
Your personal liberty ends when you start threatening my health.
Well aren't you just the quintessential convert. You had your fun and now you want to make sure nobody else gets to have theirs. What a nice guy.
The logical action would simply be to outlaw smoking tobacco altogether but the special interest groups (i.e. Big Tobacco) have too much power presently for this to be a reasonable expectation.
"Special interest groups???" How about the tens of millions of people who like to smoke? Don't they count? The nanny-state advocates seem to think that smoking is just a bad habit like scratching your balls in public.
Nicotine is a
mood leveler, a possibly unique psychoactive drug that can both elevate a person a little bit out of depression,
and pull a person a little bit down out of excessive excitement. And the person doesn't even have to be enough in touch with his own feelings to
figure out which way he needs to go.
Considering the abysmal track record and astronomical cost of psychotherapy, tobacco is an incredibly cheap and incredibly effective way to solve a problem that shrinks can't solve. Sure it has a long-term cost: decreased life expectancy and (in many cases) more dire end-of-life issues than most of us will have to endure. But most humans heavily discount the present value of future costs and benefits. They have to be browbeaten into putting money away for retirement. If they don't care whether they'll be able to afford food in forty years, guess how much they care about the illnesses they might suffer in forty years?
Especially if that will be forty years of having to live with the sub-clinical level of manic-depression that they're self-medicating with tobacco. Some of them would rather die
tomorrow than have to live another day feeling like this.
Perhaps Balerion is a guy who started smoking only because of peer pressure in high school, and now that he's stopped he has no manic-depressive moods to deal with (once he went through withdrawal). But I have a really big surprise for you:
all people are not the same! Many people started smoking because it was a psychological life-saver.
So please don't assume that his life is like theirs and what worked for him will work for them.
I realize that there are precedents (e.g. California) and similar laws in place regarding recreational drug use but in general I'm opposed to the "nanny state" enforcing what I can and can't do in the privacy of my home.
Tobacco and alcohol
each cause more illness and death than all other recreational/self-medicating drugs combined. Caffeine has fewer first-order effects than tobacco and alcohol, but the second order effects are often dire and they are virtually ignored (insomnia, for starters), as we pander this drug
to our children. So as far as I'm concerned, so long as tobacco, alcohol and caffeine are legal, the nanny state has no business outlawing cocaine, opiates, and the rest of the recreational pharmacopia. Much less marijuana, which is arguably the most benign of all popular drugs--it doesn't cause lung cancer, it doesn't motivate people to crash their cars, and it's inspired a lot of great art and music.
For that matter, how do you feel about laws currently in place in so many areas banning smoking from restaurants, etc.?
I'm a bar-band musician. Attendance at bars has dropped off since the nanny state decided it's okay to send people out into the parking lot to drive home drunk, but not to let them smoke. As a result, they can't afford to hire live bands as often as they used to. So I have nothing but contempt for the idea of banning smoking in bars. People go to bars to
take a psychoactive recreational drug: alcohol. What's wrong with letting them take all the psychoactive recreational drugs they want, as long as they're there?
I think all of it is blown way out of proportion. I lived with a smoker as a child and no one in my household ever became sick because of second hand smoke. I'm sure there are those who are sensitive to it, but I think they are a minority.
The effects of second-hand smoke are the same as the effects of first-hand smoke: they generally don't appear until you're much older. So if you get lung cancer when you're sixty, it's hard to say how much of that was due to growing up with parents who smoked, and how much to living in a city with motor vehicle exhaust in the air, and how much to sheer coincidence.
Yes, we should be able to smoke whenever and wherever we want--keep the government out of our lives.
Although I'm a libertarian I'm not of the knee-jerk variety. I think one important purpose of government is to make improvements in our lives that we can't make individually, or even by forming private institutions. The problem with cleaning up the air is "The Tragedy Of The Commons" writ large. It would not be feasible for every person who is afflicted with a respiratory disorder to allocate the responsibility among millions of fellow citizens who have pumped tobacco smoke and vehicle exhaust into the air he has been breathing for fifty years, and then bill them proportionally for damages.
Normally we libertarians advocate an expansion of the use of tort law to sort out grievances. If your neighbor at the end of the block decides to raise hogs and your quality of life is reduced by the smell, then you should be able to sue him for damages, rather than having the county re-zone your neighborhood to disallow farming. If he's making so much money from selling bacon that he can afford to pay you off, you can use that money to move to a more upscale neighborhood and somebody else will buy your house who wants to raise goats.
But you just can't do that with secondhand smoke. Both the cause and the effect are so diffused that it's impossible to perform the allocations--and even if you could it would cost so much that it would add another zero or two to the settlement amount, resulting in government bean-counters getting most of the money.
Slippery slope. What was the argument for the prohibition of alcohol? Medical. Economic, political, and social? We're seeing much the same with tobacco.
The organization that spearheaded Prohibition was the Women's Christian Temperance Union or WCTU. They simply felt that drinking was immoral. They brought in medical arguments to win support, but at heart Prohibition was just one more victory for the fucking churches.
My parents lived in Chicago in the 1920s and saw their city turned into a war zone by Prohibition. Shifting a popular commodity to the black market was a windfall for the Mafia, which overnight grew from a motley assortment of hoodlums into a business enterprise to rival the Fortune 500. America is not a nation of authority-lovers, so making alcohol illegal actually made it "cool" (in today's slang) and therefore more attractive and popular. My mother said the worst thing about Prohibition was that
women started going to bars.
America has no memory--if it did we'd all be weeping over our ancestors' treatment of the Indians and the Afro-American slaves. So we've forgotten the lessons of Prohibition, and the shit-for-brains government is repeating the same error with the War On Drugs. The only thing they changed was to carefully shift the war zone from Chicago to Mexico. If thirty thousand
Americans had been gunned down because of a failed government policy, we'd burn down the Capitol Building and tar-and-feather the President. But if it's only 30,000
Mexicans, nobody gives a damn.
As for complete ban Tasmania is concidering legislation which would ban anyone born after the year 2000 from buying smokes, in otherwords a gradual ban which doesn't penalise those who already smoke
Ah yes, the People's Republic of Down Under is in high gear.
What I do have a problem with is the state trying to protect everyone from each other to the point that all pretense of privacy and liberty is eroded beyond recognition.
What pisses me off is all these fashionable new "allergies." When I was younger, one of the nicest things about going to work was smelling all the wonderful perfume the ladies wore. I used to find an excuse to pop into all the offices just to find out what scent they were wearing today. Nowadays a lot of offices don't allow perfume. And if you go into a top-end department store to buy a bottle for your lady, all they have is cheap crap. I asked a lady behind the counter whatever happened to Joy and Opium and all the wonderful perfumes my wife used to wear and she practically broke into tears. She was ashamed of the junk she has to sell today.
How about peanuts? If we hadn't been allowed to bring peanut butter sandwiches to school for lunch,
we would have all starved.
Dog dander? Hey, if you're "allergic" to dogs you're the last person I want in my life, much less living in the house next door.
Where did these goddamn new allergies come from? They can't be genetic. In the Middle Ages anybody who was allergic to wheat, for example, would have starved to death before reaching puberty. I find a lot of credibility in the explanation that they're due to overvaccination. Most allergies are simply the body's immune system attacking itself, perhaps because it was never calibrated properly. Not exposing it to chicken pox, etc., during childhood, leaves it uncalibrated.
For instance, I also don't understand mandatory seatbelt laws, unless you want to get into the social costs of my being more severely injured or even killed in an accident that I might have waked away from.
I remember the campaign for mandatory motorcycle helmets. (I always wore mine so it didn't affect me.) The rationale was that if you got in a wreck and busted your head and didn't have medical insurance, the citizenry would have to pay your medical bills. To me that sounded like a perfectly logical reason not to allow that person into the hospital until his finances were examined and it was determined that he could pay his own bills. Sure that would have been difficult in the 1970s and he would have died first, but today it's a couple of clicks on a SmartPhone.
If you choose to ride without a helmet, and you choose to not have a lucrative career that gives you a big bank balance, then you have chosen to die if you have a wreck. Duh?
These arguments only go so far before they come into direct opposition with what I perceive as my inalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There inevitably will come a point where we must decide exactly how much freedom we are collectively willing to surrender in exchange for security. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
The world changes and since we generally appreciate the changes we have to accept the cost. Most people would not want to go back to the Paleolithic Era when there were virtually no laws, because there was no surplus food to store and lot of people died during years with low rainfall. So we put up with the laws and other inconveniences of an agricultural society, in exchange for more food and a greater lifespan.
But you can bet there were people at the time who chafed at the idea of living in a permanent village, watering plants and grazing animals, when they'd rather be out sleeping under the stars and chasing aurochs for food.
I'm sure we all have personal opinions on where this line should be drawn and I am trying to elicit a consensus amongst the community on just where that point is. Failing in that endeavor I hope to at least gather some opinions and extract some enlightenment from the diversity.
This is an international forum so I don't think there will be a consensus. We've already had an Aussie log in who believes that the government can do no wrong so we should just shut up and obey it.
But the USA has fifteen times as large a population, and government grows exponentially larger as the population grows. The Aussies might actually feel that the members of their government, who are much closer to them, are reasonably wise and accountable. But ours are not. Once you rise into the top echelons of American government, you have been selected for only two traits: 1) You love power, and 2) You know how to win elections. Knowing how to
govern is not on that list. These people are not close to us.
State has an international duty to protect children, there is no "balance" you are REQUIRED to have a focus on the child not on the adult
Oh don't get me started on that bullshit. I am fed up to death with the conversion of our society into a pedocracy. The only people who have any rights these days are children. And they are too stupid to handle them. People should have to pass a test before they're allowed to have children. Driving a car is much easier but they have to take a test for that!
This is the crux of the issue. More alarming is it appears those fanatics are us, in the sense that we elect the officials that enact more and more nanny laws. I say let the PC crowd complain. I like my privacy and freedom and respect the memory of those who died to preserve them. The pendulum has already swung too far IMHO.
I hope you vote Libertarian. You're one of us. Perhaps your screen name indicates that you are.
Although I have to admit that the world now has problems that Thomas Jefferson could not have solved. I'm beginning to feel more favorable to the Green Party, after noting that
neither of the Republocrat candidates mentioned climate change in those so-called "debates."
