It appears as though Madison, WI is heading in the direction of a total smoking ban as well.
Writer and radio personality Garrison Keillor once began a short story this way: "The last cigarette smokers in America were located in a box canyon south of Donner Pass in the High Sierra by two federal tobacco agents in a helicopter who spotted the little smoke puffs just before noon."
It's hard to tell where the last smokers in Madison will be located. But they will have to be secreted somewhere if the latest campaign to expand the city's anti-smoking ordinance succeeds.
The proposed expansion should be rejected. The existing smoking ban protects nonsmokers without eliminating smokers' freedoms and without further branding Madison as the capital of over-regulation.
Keillor wrote his story "End of the Trail" in 1984, after he quit smoking, as a spoof of smokers and the zeal with which America was making smokers a target of eradication. Years later, he remarked that some stories grow more true after you write them.
That's the case in Madison, where smoking prohibitionists have mounted their high horses for a crusade to eliminate smoking in public places.
Madison already bans smoking in public places, but the ordinance permits exceptions that the prohibitionists want to take away. They are wrong. Exceptions should be allowed.
Make no mistake. No one should smoke. Smoking kills. But thousands of people in Madison do smoke.
One of the fundamental principles of America is this: You are free to live as you wish, as long as you don't infringe on others' freedom to live as they wish. When a smoker lights up in a public place, the smoker's freedom collides with the right of the rest of us to be free from the annoyance and health risks posed by smoke.
Madison has dealt with that collision by banning smoking in most public places to allow nonsmokers to enjoy a meal, perform their jobs and view public events without being exposed to secondhand smoke. But the city permits smokers to exercise their freedom in a few places, most notably bars.
That's a good balance.
But two City Council members, Jean MacCubbin and Steve Holtzman, plan to introduce an expansion that would extend the ban to cover all bars, restaurants, bowling alleys and hotel lobbies and would take away separately ventilated smoking rooms in workplaces.
Their chief justification for the total ban is the health risks of secondhand smoke. But they tend to exaggerate those risks. Secondhand smoke contributes to or aggravates respiratory ailments from infections to asthma. But many anti-smoking crusaders like to further frighten the public by promoting the links between secondhand smoke and lung cancer and heart disease. What they fail to disclose, however, is that those links are officially categorized as "weak" by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, the American Council on Science and Health and similar organizations.
For example, exposure to secondhand smoke raises the risk for lung cancer a tad bit more than does failing to eat three helpings of fruits and vegetables a day and about the same as exposure to radon, which is, by the way, not regulated by Madison ordinance.
As far as overall health risks go, secondhand smoke is a concern, but it should be well down the list for most Madison residents.
People who smoke should be encouraged to quit. People who don't smoke shouldn't start. But Madison should not try to make itself a non-smoking island by denying the freedom to smoke. City policy should preserve the freedoms of both the smoker and nonsmoker. Madison's existing smoking ban does that job.
Let's really go off the wall. Bars overserve patrons. Drunk patrons then leave bar and kill someone on the road. So hell, let's ban alcohol in bars.
:drinky: :toast:
