Confessions of a Former Smoker

I smoked a pipe for about 20 years.  I enjoyed smoking a pipe.  I found relaxation in it as well as time to think.  I had largely stopped smoking the pipe when we moved to Raleigh, NC, but I still attended a pipe club meeting once a month until the restaurant that hosted the meetings went non smoking as well.  While I enjoyed the company, the idea that I can not smoke at a pipe club meeting, or at a tobacconist shop, is irritating to me.  This smoking ban took place ironically in a state where tobacco is grown in huge fields. 

Now, I can not defend smoking as an activity, and therefore I will not.  Nor will I claim that the anti smokers do not have a point that smoking leaves a lot of debris and detritus that no longer seems to pollute the streetscape.  Rather, let me state that just as anti marijuana laws are reviled because, after all, shouldn't an adult be allowed to consume what he or she wishes, so one must be consistent and revile anti smoking laws.  Except anti smokers are not consistent.  While condemning the cigarette smoker as a low class, trailer trash types, will themselves smoke a joint as if that were any better.  It is not.  Then of course, because the people doing the banning know little of what they ban, pipes and cigars, which are not inhaled, get thrown into the ban as well.  Remind you of anything?  Read on.

Today, at the American Thinker, Robert Hoffman asks whether  Smoking Bans and Mirrors. Is it about Health? Or Control?. Back when smoking bans were being enacted, each state trying to one up the last state that had enacted a ban, and even localities seemed to be getting into the act with even more stringent bans of their own, I read a number of articles citing studies that showed no actual causation between second hand smoke and lung cancer. These were roundly ingored. As note at Slate.com in their article Second Hand Smoke Isn't As Bad As You Thought:

Early arguments for smoking bans at least paid lip service to the idea that restrictions were necessary to protect unwilling bystanders’ health. But as bans have grown ever more intrusive even as the case for expanding them has withered, that justification has been revealed as a polite fiction by which nonsmokers shunted smokers to the fringes of society. It was never just about saving lives.

Indeed, I have always believed that to many, such as Stanton Glantz, who enjoyed a hey day during the tobacco wars performing biased research, smoking is a vile habit, and in his mind, and it turns out, many others, the habit must be stamped out by any means necessary. From the start, the war on tobacco used Alinsky's rules for radicals, naming the "enemy" freezing it, and attacking it from all sides. Of course, smokers, always a minority, were caught in the middle. But the anti smokers learned valuable lessons which they are using today on gun owners.  It isn't about health, it is about control.

The argument for smoking bans fell of deaf ears until the anti smoking zealots hit on just the right thing: second hand smoke.  Many smokers who were married to non smokers realized they would have to give up smoking for their spouses sake, if what they said about second hand smoke was true.  But as it turns out, it wasn't true.  Glantz and others had been doing biased research in an effort to make the public believe it was true.  Anti smoking groups exaggerated the claims even further.  Now, the Left thinks it has found the formula for getting rid of guns: school shootings.  While no one can defend the indefensible, like smoking, we can certainly  point out that banning guns is not the solution to school shootings.  We don't have a right to smoke, but we do have a right to bear arms for our protection and the protection of those we love.