Look, if you don’t like smoking bans, fine. The one thing we all agree on is that the First Amendment is an iron-clad, unimpeachable protection on our rights to express whatever opinions we want, be they tree-hugging or libertarian.

But if you’re going to pledge allegiance to privacy or property rights, you sound awfully hypocritical by claiming selective application — privacy rights that protect a smoker’s need to light up but not my need to breathe clean air, and property rights that prevent the government from issuing smoking bans but not from issuing health and safety codes.

That’s all I’m saying. And with that, let’s agree to disagree

I also think that the smoker’s position is often a product of (no) experience. That is, until they stop smoking, they have very little idea how much the action of a single person lighting up can impact an entire area, nevermind an enclosed room. I have quite a few former smoker friends who all experienced “holy crap that stinks!” moments a few months after they’d quit. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the matter of how that smoke sticks with you until the next shower and dry cleaning . . .

Vivian, slightly off-topic, but did you see the recent presidential poll testing “personal flaws” to see what habit or trait would make a candidate most unelectable? Smoking was one of the top responses. What’s your take on that?

That the folks who were polled obviously didn’t think before they responded. Smoking making someone unelectable seems quite a reach to me. How about doing drugs? How about drinking? How in the heck could smoking be above those?

If you don’t think the government should act on this public health threat, do you also support the repeal of government regulation of food safety and the drinking age in bars & restaurants, and if not, why are some public health threats OK to regulate but not others?

Repeal of regulation for food safety is not in the same category as smoking. I would support the repeal of a legal drinking age. MB has hit it: severity of the threat (bad food would kill us all) and the cost.

Smoke-free restaurants and bars have their place. People who smoke or don’t smoke can choose whether to go there. People can choose whether or not to work there. If no one goes to restaurants and bars where smoking is allowed, if no one is willing to work in a restaurant or bar where smoking is allowed, there will be no smoking restaurants or bars.

We don’t need a law to say no smoking allowed. You know, there is no smoking allowed in the outdoor ballpark. (But plenty of drunk folks.) How much sense does that make?

Smoking, on average, reduces adult life expectancy by approximately 14 years.

That claim always boggles my mind. How in the heck do they know what an individual’s life expectancy is? Not to mention the fact that two people would have to live identical lives (impossible) in order for the comparisons to be valid. Life expectancy, like anything else, is a numbers game made up of many different variables.

My partner’s grandfather smoked his whole life and got run over by a truck when he was 96, while going fishing. So he was supposed to have lived for another 14 years? Or maybe it was more than that since smoking wasn’t the cause of death.

The pendulum on smoking has swung, in my opinion, much too far.

My own personal measure of success for a law is whether the law protects people’s rights more than it takes people’s rights away. As yet, I have determined no way to quantify this measure. Nonetheless, I will concede cost (in dollars) is important. Good nannies do not come cheap.

Secondhand smoking is an established public health threat, spelled out by President Bush’s own surgeon general, who says, “There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”

If you don’t think the government should act on this public health threat, do you also support the repeal of government regulation of food safety and the drinking age in bars & restaurants, and if not, why are some public health threats OK to regulate but not others?

Government nannies rarely regulate us directly or with naked force. Nonetheless, government nannies do regulate us quite extensively, and we really don’t have much choice in the matter. These nannies regulate us indirectly through our employers, the regulation of businesses, and as a condition for accepting “free” government benefits.

Even though most of us accept this regulation as quite reasonable, I suspect such regulation would have given previous generations of Americans the heebie-jeebies. Consider the nanny regulation with which you have already become accustomed. Here are some common examples:
1. Participation in the social Security system comes as a condition of employment. (Social Security is a rotten investment.)
2. Banks collect information on your finances to determine whether or not you are paying your taxes or laundering money. (4th Amendment issues anyone?)
3. “Free” public schools require the immunization of children. (For the good of the many, some have died from allergic reactions.)

Well, that and your slippery slope argument, if you take it any farther. It already looks a bit silly. First, OSHA regulates worker exposure to toxic chemicals, next stop – only 15 minutes online a day! Really.

They are two ways by which we enforce behavioral standards. The first is by custom. Within each community, people reach a general consensus about the definition of good behavior. Peer pressure enforces that definition. The second way we enforce behavioral standards is by creating and enforcing laws. Because this latter approach is awkward and far more costly, wisdom dictates that we use it sparingly.

PM – Smoking costs our nation nothing — unless we volunteer to assume that cost. Otherwise it is the people who smoke who pay the bill.

Just because government insists upon paying the bill, should we allow government to dictate behavior (to reduce costs)? If we go that route, won’t we seriously endanger the concept of liberty?

Think about it. First we give government responsibility for our medical bills. Next, ostensibly to save money, we make government responsible for entertainment and diet decisions. Where does that stop? Do you want a government nanny who tells you how much time you are allowed to blog and how much time you must spend exercising?

Since government paid for your education, do you think government should choose your job for you? Sounds silly? Don’t you think the government wants you to pay as much as possible in taxes? Consider a recent decision from the Supreme Court. The Court said property could be confiscated (via eminent domain) and handed over to someone else just on the supposition the second party would pay more in taxes.

PM, your argument about job safety is a bit more difficult to refute. Nonetheless, I have two problems with it. (1) Where each of us chooses to work is our own choice. (2) Even when we can show the need for regulating job safety, we need something more significant to act upon than a mere statistical study.

Statistical do not show or prove cause and effect. At best, statistical studies infer cause and effect. This is particularly true when we use a statistical analysis on a problem like second hand smoke. How do we screen out unrelated factors?

Statistical studies about the dangers of second-hand smoke are speculative. Amongst a population of 300 million, the relatively small numbers you have provided do not show a strong relationship. We are guessing there is a relationship. In fact, what the study does show is that second hand smoke is not particularly toxic. If second hand smoke was truly toxic, people would dropping like flies and your numbers would be much larger.

Imagine the liberal uproar if we made OSHA rules voluntary.

What are restaurant workers exposed to? From the Am. Lung Ass’n.:

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Secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,400 lung cancer deaths and 22,700-69,600 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year.
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A study found that nonsmokers exposed to environmental smoke were 25 percent more likely to have coronary heart diseases compared to nonsmokers not exposed to smoke.
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Nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Levels of ETS in restaurants and bars were found to be 2 to 5 times higher than in residences with smokers and 2 to 6 times higher than in office workplaces

Smoking cost the nation about $92 billion in the form of lost productivity in 1997-2001, up about $10 billion from the annual mortality related productivity losses for the years 1995-1999, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new lost productivity estimate when combined with smoking-related health-care costs, which was reported at $75.5 billion in 1998, exceeds $167 billion per year in the United States.

The report also finds that during 1997-2001 an estimated 438,000 premature deaths occur each year as a result of smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke. In comparison, approximately 440,000 smoking-related deaths were estimated to have occurred annually from 1995-1999.

Smoking, on average, reduces adult life expectancy by approximately 14 years.

Death — Virginia’s biggest industry

I, personally, was* tired of smelling like someone else’s habit at the end of a night out. Yet I still think that bans are a bit of an overreach by gov’t (I’m not a big fan of mob rule). So whatever can be done to make places smoke-free w/o gov’t intervention, I’m interested.

*that’s was, and not am. DC has gone smoke free, as has NYC, SF, and pretty much any other place where I’m interested in the nightlife. So, thankfully, this is somewhat academic for me at this point. (We shall put aside the unreasonable smoldering hatred for smoking that briefly popped up during my time in Athens, in January . . .)