"Qui fume prie."

Wednesday, cigarette #2
Outside Sterling Memorial Library

Two news stories about smoking bans have crossed my desk in the last twenty-four hours: a Reason Brickbat about a bar in England being forced to close its windows because cigarette smoke from the porch drifting inside would constitute a violation of the law against smoking indoors, and this article from the Rocky Mountain News:

A new state law that banned smoking in Colorado's casinos went into effect Tuesday.

Reaction was divided into two camps: "I love it" or "I'm not happy."

Persichatte, 53, of Laramie, Wyo., is one of the happy campers. "I love it," she said. "If a smoker used to come and sit by me, I would move."

But James Fay, 72, of Lakewood, fumed as he puffed on a Salem Light at an outdoor smoking area that featured heaters and benches.

"I spent 22 years in the Navy standing up for people's rights, but then I find out all that I accomplished was the right for everyone to tell me I can't do something," Fay said.

Will all due respect for the Navy: no, no, no. "People's rights" are great, but that kind of rhetoric can do very little against bans on public smoking. Second-hand smoke inflicts non-negligible material harm on the people around me, which means that even if Ron Paul became president tomorrow smoking advocates would still have to come up with enough benefits to outweigh the costs in order to justify being allowed to smoke in public.

Possible compensating benefits of public smoking include: (a) Smoking cultivates the virtue of magnanimity — anyone, from the bum on the corner to the Prince of Wales, is entitled to ask for a smoke from anyone else, and expect it. (b) "The sublimity of smoking lies in its capacity to promote the illusion that we are viewing our own death, determining it from outside ourselves, living posthumously." —Richard Klein (c) By being obviously and highly symbolic, cigarettes promote a sacramental and therefore religious understanding of the universe. ("La cigarette est la prière de notre temps." —Annie Leclerc) Smoking is a family value.

The bottom line is that "Don't tread on me" won't cut it, which is why the conservatives at the front of the push for smokers' rights should be the religious/aesthetic traditionalists, not the libertarians. (This also explains why I can always bum a light up at the divinity school but never have any luck outside the economics department.)