In the interest of full disclosure I quit smoking almost three years ago. I actually calculated I had smoked approximately 300,000 cigarettes over nearly forty years. Think about it. A pack a day for forty years adds up to 291,200 cigarettes. Imagine someone telling you as a child that part of your life obligation was to smoke a few hundred thousand cigarettes. You’d be rightly horrified. In fact, I’m somewhat amazed I can even breathe when I think about it. I will also tell you the absence of cigarette smoke in my system has had a profound, positive impact on my health. My heart rate is lower as is my blood pressure. So you would think I’d be beating the drum for President Obama’s new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act. Well, I’m not.
Here’s the problem with this and other anti-smoking legislation. I don’t think it’s the government’s job to regulate choice or personal behavior. The irony here is the anti-smoking fanatics are for the most part the same folks always screaming about choice. Their definition of choice is you agree with us or we’ll see to it you have no choice. This legislation is just another example of the nanny state and the liberal’s intention to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. It started with smoking and that insufferable, patronizing attitude is evidencing itself with efforts to regulate everything from fast food to soda pop.
But let’s go back to the legislation Obama signed into law Monday in a Rose Garden ceremony. The act empowers the Food and Drug administration to regulate nicotine for starters. Am I missing something but are cigarettes food or a drug? They’re a pleasurable bad habit like so many things in life. If a person wants to smoke like a chimney or eat 10 bacon double cheeseburgers a day, what possible business is that of the federal government? One of the many benefits of living in a free society is the right to do as we damn well please within the confines of the law. Unless smoking cigarettes is deemed an illegal act, the distribution and consumption of cigarettes should not be regulated.
I can already hear you out there fuming (a little cigarette humor). The first retort is smoking kills. Yes and no. It’s clearly not good for you but I am living proof smoking doesn’t kill. No question it contributes to lung and heart problems but smoking critics tend to blame cigarettes for almost every inevitable malady. Take second hand smoke as an example. You will never convince me that being in the same room with a smoker is going to cause me any harm. If it did my children and a number of dogs and cats would all be dead or impaired. Second hand smoke is utter nonsense and detracts from any serious discussion about smoking.
I realize this legislation is just another stop on the road to outlawing smoking. Why it has become a partisan, political issue is beyond me. Like most things in life, choosing to smoke should be a personal decision and if impacts someone negatively, so be it. But I don’t want Uncle Sam playing smoke or burger police.
Jim Langan can br reached at editorial@thehudsonvalleynews.com
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A friend often asks, if something -- for example, newspapers -- were launched today, how would they be designed. Well, not the way we've been getting them, delivered manually to the doorstep, filled with yesterday's news.
Now ask the same question about cigarettes -- if launched today, would the FDA approve them? Without even looking at second-hand smoke, but based on the impact it has on smoker's health (like your example, Jim), I doubt the medical community would want cigarettes to be legal.
I'm a non-smoker, and know there's a slippery slope, including other things that are dangerous yet still legal. But if you look at the financial impact that cigarette smoking has on our health care system, I think it would be fiscally prudent to ban them.
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