Obama signed into law the newest anti-smoking bill. It will allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate - but not ban - the use of tobacco.
To the sorrow of my brother-in-law Joe, a non-addicted and infrequent puffer of cherry-flavored seegars, the bill also forbids adding candy or fruit flavors to tobacco products. Joe indulges only during hunting season, summer horseshoe pitching, that kind of thing. To him, cigars are like corn on the cob, a seasonal treat, not a daily necessity. He wants to keep his cherry seegars.
Me, I'm a conservative, a believer in limited government and (until last year's financial meltdown), deregulation.
But I also smoked for 55 years. So I see a need for people to quit.
Tobacco can be addictive.
Too many of us claim that tobacco is always addictive, ignoring the realities of people like Joe and me. He puffs, stops for weeks or months, then re-puffs. I can't do that. On June 12, I was in danger of falling off the anti-tobacco wagon when Joe and I adjourned from yoga class (Yes, yoga class; whaddaya wanna do about it, huh, huh?) to a nearby bar to watch the Stanley Cup finale. I caught myself inhaling the second-hand smoke far too deeply, absently reaching for ephemeral cigarettes in my shirt pocket or checking my pants pocket for a now-nonexistent lighter.
With alcohol, it is different - for me. I can have a beer, or a shot of Old Grand-Dad, or a glass or two of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur or Joe's favorite, B&B, of an evening, then not drink another alcoholic brew for a month or more.
Other people can't do that.
Alcohol and tobacco ... poisons, or pastimes. It depends.
Here's the lesson: We should not try to ban the use of tobacco outright. Our experiences with Prohibition in the 1930s, and with marijuana since the 1960s, teach the folly of trying to ban something not universally harmful in a free society.
But we are moving in the right direction with respect to tobacco. We tax its use heavily. We discourage its use through penalties. The effects of tobacco on our health care insurance rates can't be ignored. I am ready to support increased health-care premiums for tobacco users, even those who are covered by group policies.
Tobacco use causes that much financial harm. Yes, it does.
The tobacco industry had me for 55 years, puffing as much as three packs a day. Sure, it was my choice. But it wasn't a totally free choice, not when I started smoking at age 8 (Yeah. Age 8), or when I was puffing a pack a day as a 12-year-old newspaper carrier, that job having given me the money to buy the cheap Lucky Strikes and Camels.
It was menthol, though, that kept me sucking on the poisonous vapors for most of those years. Unflavored tobacco had begun to burn my throat and start my windpipe and lungs into cough-inducing shudders. The "cooling" (actually, pain-killing) effects of menthol let me keep deluding myself into thinking that tobacco use wasn't too harmful, despite mounting evidence.
Why does a believer in limited government, in individual freedom, condone this Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act?
Back when the Vietnam War was raging, I subscribed to the "drink-at-18" movement, on the reasonable-sounding premise that if a kid was old enough to fight and die for our country, that kid was old enough to drink.
The premise ignores a stark fact: When drinking at age 18 was legal, the death rate among victims of 18-21-year-olds soared.
The kid might be old enough to drink, in theory. But in practice, backed up by the irrefutable statistics of what was happening on our highways, giving 18-year-olds the "right" to drink also gave them the "right" to drive drunk - because 18-year-olds who are drunk will drive. Why? Because they're 18 years old and drunk and stupid, that's why, and I've been there, done that, too.
Eventually, I came to the realization that living in communities requires compromises - all sorts of compromises. My right to swing my arm ends somewhere near your nose. Your right to play loud music ends somewhere near my wake-from-sleep decibel level.
Political theory is nice.
Reality is that some things kill.
Use of alcohol kills, and among not-fully-grown teenagers, it kills at an unacceptably high rate, both for the teens and for the rest of us in their paths.
Use of tobacco kills, and hooks us as addicts, at unacceptably high rates.
So, sorry, Joe. Much as I love you, much as I agree you haven't done anything to deserve losing the pleasure of puffing your cherry cheroots, I support the action.
Let tobacco taste like tobacco.
That honesty ought to allow our bodies' "stop-killing-me" signals to be more clearly heard by our brains.
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Denny Bonavita is the editor and publisher of McLean Publishing Co. in west-central Pennsylvania, including the Courier-Express in DuBois. E-mail: denny2319@windstream.net
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