RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Smoking ban

I smoked for 10 years. I quit a year and a half ago. While I was a smoker, I looked with fear and dread towards each smoking ban that forged way into Philadelphia City Council. Each piece of legislation introduced in Philly has died somewhere along the way, but someday one of these bans will stick. At this point I could give a shit either way.

At this point the issue is so muddled with idiots that it’s nearly impossible to take a side. On one side, smokers act as though the right to smoke is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, somewhere just above the second amendment and that a smoking ban in indoor public places is just legislative terrorism enacted by a cabal of rabid fascists.

On the other hand, they have a point. Proponents of a smoking ban are often more concerned with not having to be near cigarette smoke than they are about the bar and restaurant workers they use as the moral pawns in their stupid little game. As New Jersey debates outdoor smoking rules, (as was quoted in an NPR story to keep people from having to walk through a “cloud of smoke” when entering a restaurant) I can’t help but think of this photo I took up in Portland, Maine last summer… In case you can’t read it, the neatly stenciled message on that giant oil tanker reads “PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT - NO SMOKING”:

In my irrelevant opinion, smoking ban indoors = arguably ok. Smoking ban outdoors = arguably the weakest argument for environmental and human health ever proposed with a straight face. Banning smoking in outdoor public places is probably about as an effective way to clean up the planet, as duck and cover is for surviving a thermonuclear attack. That’s all for now.