Not Sure If I’m Allowed to Do This

…but, here it goes anyway. I’ve always been a bigger fan of begging forgiveness rather than asking approval.

Anyway, my second op-ed column got published this past Wednesday in our local newspaper. I thought they would post it online like they did my first one, but it hasn’t showed up yet, so I’m just going to post it here myself. Let’s all hope I don’t get in trouble for copy infringement!

New Albany’s Great Debate – The Smoking Ban

My first cigarette was smoked sometime during my fifteenth year. It was a stolen Merit Menthol Light that I smoked while holding at arms length outside my bedroom window, hoping the smell and the smoke wouldn’t linger in my room.

Between then and July of 2007, I was a sometimes regular smoker (mostly through college), a sometimes social smoker (mostly in bars), and a sometimes stress smoker (mostly after Thanksgiving dinners). I liked Camel Lights, soft pack.

I’ve been fortunate never to step into the realm of chain-smoking, or need a cigarette badly enough and often enough that a carton purchase was more necessary than buying a pack. I do remember the pleasure and artistry of smoking. The million different ways you can hold your cigarette and ash it; the way you can use it to emphasize whatever it is you’re discussing; the way you can light it with a match or, even better, a Zippo; and what’s more gratifying than that first cigarette with a cold beer or a cup of coffee?

It’s been over a year since my last cigarette and I’ll never say never about smoking another one. Just a few Sundays ago, after watching back-to-back episodes of Mad Men, all I could think about was lighting up. I see both sides of the smoking ban-the filter and the butt.

And here’s my but: even as someone who can value the fulfilling-albeit fleeting-effects of the perfect smoke at the perfect time, don’t we want to live in a city that promotes the health of the overall community?

As a mayor, don’t you want to govern a progressive city? A city that leads by example and says that the physical welfare of our whole community is more important than the economic demands of a handful of business owners?

You can pull research and resources that validate both sides of this debate. A simple Google search will return studies to prove and disprove the actual adverse effects of secondhand smoke. There are also studies that show little to no effect on the economic impact on businesses in the cities where smoking bans are enforced.

And then there are the smokers. I can hear the mental chorus now, “What about our freedom? Our right to light up! Keep your legislative hands off my pack of smokes!”

It’s the defiant cry of people who are tired of being led by a government that wants to control their every move (even though they often look to the same government to control their rising health care costs.)

Here’s my but to this argument: haven’t we been duped? Duped into believing that a cigarette should be fought for as one of our basic rights-a product that has been proven over and over to cause slow, horrific deaths, low birth rates, and a constant stream of unaffordable health problems.

The tobacco industry, arguably the most inherently evil corporate organization during the last century, was also the most genius marketing force ever to hit our capitalistic shores. They took one of our basic psychological shortcomings, our nature for oral fixation, and fed it a stick stocked with damaging and crushingly addictive chemicals.

They made it cool from the beginning. Who didn’t want to be (or date) a Marlboro man? And when women took the corner offices, the tobacco industry was the first to let us know how far we had come (although, they still called us babies). They watched quietly as smoking habits were passed from one generation to the next and reinforced their dirty little secrets by promoting cigarettes to the younger generations with candy cigarettes and cartoon advertising.

This is an industry that profited on promoting cigarettes to children when they knew it was beyond harmful to the child’s lifelong health.

And now, the biggest triumph of all: they’ve convinced their involuntarily loyal customers to fight for them, “No matter how it affects me, my children, or the people around me; LET ME SMOKE!”

I don’t want to preach to people and tell them they shouldn’t smoke. I say, “Smoke up all you want.” But, don’t argue that it should be legal to do it in the restaurant where I’m trying to enjoy a meal, or behind the counter of my local convenient store. A smoking ban doesn’t limit your right to smoke; it protects my right to keep your smoke off of my-and my child’s-clothes, hair, and lungs.

The smoking ban appears to be an almost dead issue at the time. The mayor has vetoed it and the committee to review it is slow moving. Maybe it’s just not our time yet. Every city progresses at its own speed. Small steps, right? First we bring it in front of council. We debate it until we’re blue in the face. And eventually, we choose healthy progressive measures to advance our community instead of setting them afire.