Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!wivax!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!ariel!houti!hogpc!houxm!hocda!spanky!burl!duke!unc!tim From: tim@unc.UUCP Newsgroups: net.flame Subject: Re: Smoking . . . (Slow Motion Suicide) Message-ID: <5349@unc.UUCP> Date: Thu, 9-Jun-83 22:13:38 EDT Article-I.D.: unc.5349 Posted: Thu Jun 9 22:13:38 1983 Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jun-83 06:26:05 EDT References: flairvax.130 Lines: 65 Here are two recent articles on net.flame on the subject of anti-smoking legislation. The first one is a reply to an article of mine, in which I claimed that public smoking should not be controlled by the police in a free society. I'm amused at how unc!tim sabotoges his own argument by saying, "Freedom requires responsibility" to justify smokers' rights. He goes on to say that those of us who are non-smokers are required to act responsibly and allow smokers their right to polute our environment. Where he sabotoges his argument is simply that he, while requiring responsibility from non-smokers, requires no similar responsibility from smokers. The way I under- stand his argument, non-smokers must allow smokers the right to smoke, but in turn are granted no rights to en- joy a healty and non-lethal atmosphere. Well, I'm glad you at least got some amusement out of it, since you seem to have missed its content. The point is that the link between public smoking and danger to healthy people nearby is currently only tenuously proven. Certainly there is some danger; after all, you do breathe a few smoke particles. I expect that the ambient pollution from cars and other internal combustion machines in a large city is somewhat more dangerous than public smoking. Can you disprove this? If not, then it seems to me that you're throwing away people's freedoms in a pretty cavalier way. Someone smoking near a person who has a health hazard that would be worsened by any inhalation of smoke is extremely vile, provid- ed of course that the person is asked to stop, the situation is explained, and the person contiues to smoke. Such idiots should be prosecuted for charges commensurate with physical assault, be- cause that is just what they are doing. Now, on to the second letter. As a smoker, I was not at all offended by the recent anti-smoking submissions. In fact, my personal feeling is that cigarettes should be made illegal. Sure, a huge black market would form... just like marijuana is now. But people would smoke in privacy or with other addicts, never in public. My worst problem with breaking this obnoxious habit is that there are cigarettes EVERYWHERE I go -- in checkout lines of every kind of store, in machines at work and at every kind of establishment... You're sick, do you know that? You want to put people in jail to be gangraped by large felons for smoking, do you? Well, that's what making cigarettes illegal is really all about. The laws are not there as bluffs; they can and will be enforced. Have you ever had a friend busted for selling a few joints to an undercov- er cop who pretended to be his friend? I have, more than one. Remember, laws always imply cops and prisons. They are not mere- ly little things that we should create whenever people aren't acting just the way we think they should. They are at best a necessary evil. The freest society is one in which there are only those laws which are necessary to its continued functioning. Tim Maroney