Smoking

Smoking cigarettes is irrational. Cigarette smoking can steal your health and take years off your life. If I could live true in every sense to the ideas I promote, I would certainly quit smoking. To date, I am unable to do so.

Perhaps, I’ve confessed a weakness here? So be it. But know this: I have not relinquished my right to care for, or to abuse, my own body. Nobody has the right to tell me what I can put into my body.

So how did state and local governments manage to ban smoking in work places, restaurants, and bars across the country? They hypothesized about something called second-hand smoke and then proved it exists. They argued that my smoking actually has an adverse effect on the health of other people, non-smokers who are exposed to my smoke. If I accept the science of second-hand smoke, which by the way, I do, then I cannot in good conscience smoke in an enclosed environment where non-smokers might be exposed. I have no problem with this. I would never light up in my classroom, or in the teacher’s lounge, or anywhere else inside the school building. I don’t have to be told not to. But, once I walk out that door and I’m standing with nothing but the great blue sky over my head, there is no justification for any law that criminalizes my decision to smoke a cigarette.

I have been an outlaw since the early 1990s, when the school system for which I worked banned smoking anywhere on campus. The school I worked for was an “open-air” school: when I stepped outside of my classroom, I could see the sky. I ignored the ban on smoking because I recognize no man’s right to tell me what I can put into my body. In an open-air environment, there is no rational basis for the infringement of my right.

Some of you will say that a smoking ban on school grounds is valid because I’m setting a bad example for my students. Ridiculous. Sneaking off to smoke in my car, hiding my lawful behavior, denying who I am and what I do is a hypocrisy my students never have to factor into their definitions of me. Furthermore, students who like me love to beg me to stop; some have even researched the dangers of smoking for me. Students who dislike me love to walk by and say things like “you’re going to die!” Whenever my students demand I explain my irrational behavior, I am afforded a unique “teaching moment.” I begin by asking: “Do you know why I smoke?”—They respond with science, humor, psychology, etc.—I say: “No…I smoke for one reason: Because I started.” An anecdote about how I’d love to go back to that day at Chuwakala Park, Auburn, Al. when I decided to switch from Skoal chewing tobacco to cigarettes follows. When all is said and done, I’ve taught a complete lesson, including: the science of addiction, the psychology of peer pressure, the ethics of hypocrisy, and the philosophy of a free man.

Those of you who argue that I’m putting a drag on the health care system because smokers get sick, I say, are you kidding me? I pay for my health insurance. My behavior is between me and the insurance company I am paying. I’ve been paying premiums for twenty years and during that time I have never been seriously ill, I’ve never been hospitalized, I rarely go to the doctor, I can’t remember the last time I took a prescription drug. My insurance company must love me: I’ve been paying for nothing for twenty years.

Supporters of universal health care are famous for making the “drag on the health care system” argument. When they finally have their way, and America follows Europe’s socialist lead, the health police will be out in force, unchecked, banning all kinds of harmful choices. Liberty will be sacrificed in the name of what’s good for you…whether you like it or not. I’d like to know the numbers: How much of a drag do overweight, inactive people put on the health care system? Will they be banning all fast food? Mandating exercise? The solution to the health care crisis in this country, as is the case in every instance where value is traded for value: Take the government out of the equation. Capitalism, the laws of supply and demand, individual responsibility…these are the solutions. Yet, we continue to move in the opposite direction.

Probably the most troubling thing about the new laws is government’s use of force to ban smoking in privately owned and operated establishments, restaurants and bars. In a free, capitalistic economy decisions about appropriate behavior in a private establishment are made by the owners. Rather than the all-inclusive ban we have today, what we should have is restaurants and bars that advertise a non-smoking atmosphere and others that permit smoking. The choice would be left to the owners, those who have the most to gain or lose. No force was ever necessary.

Why do we continue to hand this sort of power over to the politicians? Free people should be permitted to make choices about where they want to go and what they want to do when they go out.