If we're lucky, state's outdated policies on public puffing will go up in smoke
Every weekday morning, barely past the first glint of sunrise, a neighborhood teenager pokes her head out of her second-floor bedroom window and puffs a cigarette.
I wish she wouldn't, especially at such a tender age.
Of course, it's none of my business.
Many of my friends tell me that they began smoking as teens because it looked stylish, or made them feel older or more sophisticated. Few say it was pleasant or tasted good. Then they got hooked.
Just as I suspect many of the young people in my neighborhood will. Some sneak drags in the cover of night.
Others walk along the street, raining butts on the asphalt in a sad little nicotine-flavored trail of tears.
Never mind that it looks cool now. Just wait till your teeth turn brown and your breath goes bad.
In that special way he had with words, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once described his habit of smoking as many as 90 cigarettes a day as "a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide."
The author died last week at 84 from an ailment unrelated to tobacco, but he had a point: Smoking is one of the vilest, unhealthiest, most disgusting habits known to man.
Somehow, though, I doubt my teenaged neighbor has read a whole lot of Vonnegut. Besides, what a neighborhood teen does in her own room on her own time with her own lungs is, like I said, none of my business.
When she does it in a restaurant or workplace, well, that's another matter.
That's why a bill in the state Legislature that would ban smoking in most public places makes common sense even if it doesn't make political sense - at least not yet - in the Land of the Golden Leaf.
The bill likely will be revised into a slightly tamer, filtered version ... think Marlboro Lights instead of Camels. But even so, it reflects a major shift in thinking among legislators and North Carolinians, 64 percent of whom favor a smoking ban in restaurants.
Chances are the bill will ban smoking in restaurants and a remove a silly law that requires cities to have to seek General Assembly approval to set their own smoking regulations. Hence, Greensboro city leaders had to get legislative approval in Raleigh to ban smoking in the Greensboro Coliseum.
Opponents of smoking bans counter that smokers are becoming an oppressed minority - banished from workplaces into parking lots and from parking lots onto street corners. And, God bless 'em, my heart does go out to co-workers who shiver in the cold and rain and the darkness of night - just for a precious chance to poison their lungs and shorten their lives.
Some also argue that government is getting way to big for its bureaucratic britches and meddling in the choices and rights of individual citizens in the guise of "protecting" them from dangerous behaviors.
That's precisely the lucrative hook high-powered lobbyist Rick Berman has hung his hat on.
"If the government is truly interested in my health and welfare," Berman, whose clients have included the restaurant, food and alcoholic beverage industries, told CBS's "60 Minutes last week, "I'm appreciative of it. But, I think I can take care of myself."
So if I want to eat trans fats, leave me alone and let me clog my arteries in peace.
And if I want to gab on my cell phone while driving blindfolded, hey that's my choice.
But the problem is, of course, when your individual choice endangers me. Secondhand smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, 50 of which can cause cancer. It can cause respiratory ailments. More than 35,000 nonsmokers die each year from heart disease triggered by secondhand smoke.
That's why state lawmakers' newfound gumption to do right by citizens and stand up to smoking as a health hazard is fair and thoughtful public policy.
Do what you will in your house and on your property. That's your business. But when you start huffing and puffing into my air space, it's my business.
So, in advance, thank you for not smoking.
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Posted on April 17, 2007 4:02 PM