Smoking or Non-Smoking?

I don’t smoke, and I don’t hang around with people who do, but I have to imagine that it’s difficult to be a smoker. Not just the breathing part, which has to be difficult, too, but the social part as well. There is a stigma attached to smoking, and it gets worse every day.
It’s a strange thing, the smoking. No nutritional value, no physical benefits of any kind to themselves or the people around them and no societal use – yet it continues.

Last summer, our legislators in New Jersey finally got around to passing anti-smoking laws, which ban smoking in public, except on casino floors, where, as we know, smoke isn’t harmful. Slowly, other places are joining us. Last week, a milestone was reached when more than half the states had passed similar laws. In parts of Ohio, you can't even smoke outdoors. Come out smokers, we’ve got you surrounded!

It’s cold here in the Garden State. Cold enough that the smokers have to put on their winter gear. Most of them are bitter about having to go outdoors to do something that, up until six months ago, they could do indoors, but for those of us who like going home without the stench of Marlboro, we say “thanks”. At the bar, they miss big chunks of games and their drinks get warm and their food gets cold, but they don’t stop puffing. If it were me, I’d have to think that anything that is so reviled by society that they would chase me outside to do it must be a horrible thing. It might even be enough to get me to quit, but if I was addicted (as the smokers are) then I suppose it’s easier said than done. But the smokers don’t seem to be affected enough by being social outcasts that they consider stopping. Huddling them up outside only serves to give them a united voice, as they shiver and smoke. Maybe the menthol keeps them warm?

Now, New Jersey lawmakers want to ban smoking in cars that are occupied by children. Their little lungs are more susceptible to the smoke than their parents’. How they would go about enforcing that is anyone’s guess, but it would be yet another place where smokers are chastised. Pretty soon, I suppose they’ll have to rope-off a section of their home as a “Smoking Area” and start watching out for the black helicopters.

I feel sympathy for them, in a “Let Freedom Ring” kind of way. I don’t really want to inhale the smoke or have my clothes infested, but they are addicted, and to banish them to the back alley and separate them from the public won’t accomplish what most of us want, which is to get them to quit.

They can’t quit, because the government allows an addictive substance to be sold to people. They are addicted to the cigarettes, and their addiction is easily satisfied because the product is available. They justify it by making laws banning its use in certain areas and not allowing its sale to minors, but it is easy to get. If they had to sit in a Denny’s parking lot waiting for their friend to score them a carton while they craned their neck looking for cops, they might give it up. But something tells me that they still might do it, even though they faced being a horribly addicted loser with yellow teeth and jittery hands from nicotine withdrawal. We have already forced them out of our restaurants, bars and offices; so what’s one more public humiliation to people who are already pariahs? They’d be out there with the pot smokers and glue sniffers, looking to score.

So where are we? We have a product that is so hideous that we make laws restricting its use, because it kills everything in its path. We tax it to the point where the tax is as big a part of the price as the product. For another couple of bucks they could be smoking dope. For a variety of reasons, we can’t make it illegal, so we do what we always do – we make new laws, and turn otherwise regular people into criminals. In the last 25 years, smoking has gone from being “kinda cool” to social anathema.

We’re going about this the wrong way, folks. Don’t turn people into criminals. We have enough laws. Corporate America and our federal government collaborated to make cigarettes what they are today. You convinced them it was cool (and even named a product after it); sold them the product and now you spend most of your time chasing them around. It doesn’t make sense. The government gets into bed with tobacco and then makes laws against it.

Make up your mind.