COLUMN: Ban smoking outright
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.
