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COLUMN: Ban smoking outright

By Ben Harris on October 17, 2011 12:00 pm in Columns / 14 comments

 

The smoking ban has cleaned the air in restaurants and bars and shown that cigarettes are becoming a thing of the past.

Concentrated efforts of people too cool to smoke started paying off long ago. Now if a woman wants to have a cigarette with her coffee, she’ll have to smoke it out in the cold, as she should. It’s not healthy, but smokers don’t care about their health anyway. They’re hedonistic monsters.

But the fight is far from over. A man who wants to take his young son to a nice dinner in a smoke-free bar at midnight may be in luck now, but he’s still susceptible to having to walk through a cloud of smoke on the way out once they get 25 feet away from the building.

A man who wants to have a cigarette with his dinner will have to eat on the street. It’s not fair to other patrons who sit in the non-smoking section to have to glance over and see the fetid air being devoured by the overhead fan. Watch that while eating your eggs and hash browns. Not good.

It’s not fair to the proprietor of the bar or restaurant to have the droves of rabid smokers puffing on their cancer sticks in the middle of his establishment. He wants to kick them out, but he’s too afraid. So now the law has done it for him.

For all the success, we need a new crusade. The loud must be louder. We need to abandon all other causes and assume a new fervor.

Vote for politicians in favor of banning smoking. Protest in front of smoke shops. Show the world how you feel about cigarettes.

I know, we all know, in fact, that if everyone stopped smoking, we would all live a thousand years.

The only way to make it happen is to outlaw cigarettes, cigars and pipes. Pull the product out of the stores overnight. To possess: Prison. To sell: Death by firing squad. We need to show addicts that dissent will not be tolerated.

It’s a public health risk. So then when the cigarette battle has been fought and won, we can tackle other risks to community health, like the sun. It’s been giving good, honorable, misguided people melanoma for millennia.

Of course, we don’t have the technology to obliterate the sun, nor to survive without it, but we can pass laws and up our enforcement. It’s what the government is good for.

When the first gusts of summertime wind creep in, the enforcers can creep out. They’d waltz through the street corners, issuing court citations for FTWS (Failure to Wear Sunblock). We all know the police are good at issuing citations. That will teach people to wear sunblock. It’s a deterrent.

Then the revenue from the sunblock tickets would make up for the revenue lost in the tobacco taxes, and the budget would be balanced, the recession would be over, and the world would be saved.

All thanks to the smoking ban.

 

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  • Guitarded21

    This is the silliest thing I have read lately and now feel less intelligent for reading it. Lets all wear uniforms and outlaw freedom of religion too while we’re at it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Sheila-Martin/100000104130795 Sheila Martin

    THis is fun! So, we anti smoking fanatics, who now rule the bars, can now go outside and find a smoker and kick the crap out of them! And the cops will just look the other way! Just one question? Now that the bars are all closing, and people are not buying tobacco, who is going to replace the couple of billion dollars in taxes they were paying? Not ME! I’m a good guy!

  • http://profiles.google.com/cantiloper Michael McFadden

    (Link removed for ease of posting.) . . . . .

    Jack, Thustud, it’s a satire.  :>   (Yeah, I know: with all the truly psychotic Antismokers out there it’s hard to tell sometimes.  I ran across a very sincere posting the other day where a woman was convinced that using a smoker’s phone had given her breast cancer.  No, I’m not kidding.) . . . . . Ben, wonderfully done!  Of course you realize that things like sunblock and awnings only provide “partial protection” from Solar Radiation Effects.  There is NO reason why workers should be forced to work in a carcinogenic environment!  Daytime patio dining needs to be outright banned, pure and simple.  If people are drinking in a bar or eating in a restaurant and they feel the need to get a dose of skin cancer they can simply pop outside and lie on the sidewalk for a few minutes.  What’s the big deal? . . . . . Sunshine ain’t the only problem though:  Google: (“secondary smoke, alcohol, and deaths” +jamrozik) just like that, and think about the poor young waitresses dying an early and painful death just so some liver-pickled lush can have a martini with their greaseburger! . . . . . Michael J. McFadden, Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”

  • Doesn’t Matter

    Thank you for speaking for the entire community of restaurant and bar owners, I’m pretty sure my non-smoking father was not very happy about the  ban seeing as his bar’s profits are down immensely, if you ban smoking entirely it would be pure anarchy. You can walk into a restaurant now and not worry about smoke, so what is the problem? One of the most ridiculous articles I’ve read in this paper in 4 years

  • http://www.facebook.com/marlene.bakken Marlene Bakken

    LOVE the satire!  And yet it nails the Prohibitionist lobby right on the head.  Smoking has been known to make marginally rational people go bonkers over the sight of a smoker.  The pleasure a smoker undertakes gets at the very craw of these marginally sane people in a way that defies explanation.  The anti-smoker’ s brain crawls with unexplainable firing of synapses in the regions of logical thought.  The anti-smoker begins to sweat uncontrollably, eyeballs begin spinning, and their heart rates spin out of control.  There is no treatment or cure, other than a padded room for a spell.

  • InterestedObserver

    The sunblock analogy is not quite right. If someone next to me is not wearing sunblock, that has no immediate negative impact on me. However, someone smoking next to me does have an immediate negative impact on me. That’s the whole problem. I am thankful every day for laws that ban smoking in public places.

  • http://profiles.google.com/cantiloper Michael McFadden

    Observer, you wrote, “The sunblock analogy is not quite right. If someone next to me is not wearing sunblock, that has no immediate negative impact on me. However, someone smoking next to me does have an immediate negative impact on me”

    Partly right and partly wrong.  The sunblock analogy was meant to apply to the excuse that has been universally used over the last 15 years for workplace smoking bans: the concept that if you have a bar with smoking (or an outdoor patio), some poor person will be trapped into “choosing between their health and a paycheck” to feed their poor little children.  The “person sitting next to me” argument was dropped a long time ago because the counterargument is so clear: no one is FORCING anyone to enter private businesses as customers.

    - MJM

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Sheila-Martin/100000104130795 Sheila Martin

    Albert Einstein loved smoking his pipe more than anything else he did. Wonder what he would have to say about all this brohaha. I think he might have come up with a Theory of Moronativity.
    I can just imagine some fanatic, prohibitionist, nutjob walking up to him and telling him to put his pipe out! Or telling Frank Sinatra, he couldn’t smoke at the Sands in Vegas.
    What happened to the b###s on men these days? You’re going to let a bunch of nanny, foo foo, schoolmarms dictate your life?
    By the way, the oldest recorded person died at 122 years of age. He smoked like train.

    You’re going to die. Accept it, and like Shawshank said, “Get busy living, or get busy dying”. If you have all this free time to pester other people, you need to get a life.

  • Dumb

    Ben you’re just stupid dumb.

  • Anonymous

    We’ve been told for years secondhand smoke is deadly dangerous but we are here alive and there are no deaths from it, not even close.
    It’s an exaggerated, created science all its own. It’s propaganda – fallacies created to have justifications for a new round of tobacco prohibition. I am for freedom, freedom for all people to have their own place in this world, including the smokers!
    Tobacco smoke maybe an irritant to some, but that’s about it. Its chemical makeup has been so exaggerated by tobacco control pundits, it’s insanity. Only 6 percent of tobacco smoke constitutes those 7,000 theorized and identified components of the smoke. Theorized is the word, since the claimed chemicals are themselves so small they can barely be detected. Nanograms, femtograms are the sizes of what can be detected so they theorize the rest. Four percent is carbon monoxide, while nearly 90 percent constitutes ordinary atmospheric air! These figures come from the surgeon general’s report in 1989.
    Oh the pundits may bring up benzene in tobacco smoke. The average cigarette produces roughly 300 micrograms of benzene (1986 report of the surgeon general. p.130) 0.3 micrograms – 300 nanograms.
    Benzene is normally found in fruits, fish, vegetables, nuts, dairy products, beverages and eggs. The National Cancer Institute estimates that an individual may safely ingest up to 250 micrograms in their food per day, every single day of the year.
    Thus, the “safe” exposure to benzene from one day of a normal diet is roughly equal to the exposure experienced by a nonsmoker sharing an airspace with smokers for over 750 hours.
    It’s a political movement and it was never about health….

  • Anonymous

    We’ve been told for years secondhand smoke is deadly dangerous but we are here alive and there are no deaths from it, not even close.
    It’s an exaggerated, created science all its own. It’s propaganda – fallacies created to have justifications for a new round of tobacco prohibition. I am for freedom, freedom for all people to have their own place in this world, including the smokers!
    Tobacco smoke maybe an irritant to some, but that’s about it. Its chemical makeup has been so exaggerated by tobacco control pundits, it’s insanity. Only 6 percent of tobacco smoke constitutes those 7,000 theorized and identified components of the smoke. Theorized is the word, since the claimed chemicals are themselves so small they can barely be detected. Nanograms, femtograms are the sizes of what can be detected so they theorize the rest. Four percent is carbon monoxide, while nearly 90 percent constitutes ordinary atmospheric air! These figures come from the surgeon general’s report in 1989.
    Oh the pundits may bring up benzene in tobacco smoke. The average cigarette produces roughly 300 micrograms of benzene (1986 report of the surgeon general. p.130) 0.3 micrograms – 300 nanograms.
    Benzene is normally found in fruits, fish, vegetables, nuts, dairy products, beverages and eggs. The National Cancer Institute estimates that an individual may safely ingest up to 250 micrograms in their food per day, every single day of the year.
    Thus, the “safe” exposure to benzene from one day of a normal diet is roughly equal to the exposure experienced by a nonsmoker sharing an airspace with smokers for over 750 hours.
    It’s a political movement and it was never about health….

  • Anonymous

    “For all the success, we need a new crusade. The loud must be louder. We
    need to abandon all other causes and assume a new fervor.”

    You’re a sick sick moron.

    Did you not know that the world is on the brink of revolution from corporate oppression and it is too big to co-opt?

    Didn’t think so.

    You know,
    When I get angry and want to write a big long rant with lots of immature remarks in it -
    I smoke a cigarette instead.

    If you’re so worried about Cancer – maybe you should send a letter to Dow Chemical about why the cancer rates are so high between Isabella and Bay Counties.
    Maybe you should sell your car and stop doing laundry.
    Maybe you should stop voting with your dollar for GMO garbage.

    Perhaps we’d be better off if all the other carcinogens being violently introduced into our environment without are knowledge were given more attention.

    Nice article though. It made be giggle like a school girl.
    Maybe you’ll understand the constitution and black market economies when you’re older.

  • Anonymous

    Ok.

    If this is satire – It went right over my head.

    I whole-heartedly believe CM-Life would publish an article that was this draconian with a straight face.

  • Anonymous

    You’re no Jonathon Swift