IF YOU NEED A COP, JUST LIGHT UP

Morality should be symmetrical. If we're beaten with a stick for one vice,
then we should be beaten with a stick of equal length and flex for a vice
of equivalent allure.

This isn't one of the rules of equity gnawed over by youngling lawyers
while they're still filing their teeth in law school. Its evident
evenhandedness and clarity might be thought too much, possibly traumatic,
for the little sharks-in-diapers of a profession that thrives on the
obscure and the sinuous.

I'm sure that when Allan Rock attended law school, the rule of symmetry
wasn't posted as part of the course work. And judging from the remorseless
pedantry with which he continues to run his health jihad against smoking,
it hasn't polluted his mind.

Mr. Rock is now campaigning to remove the signals "light," "mild" and
"medium" from the packaging of cigarettes. The dental porn and
knee-slapping impotence jokes, together with the apocalyptic health
warnings that now brocade every cigarette pack, are evidently not enough
for the cause. Why stop with "light" and "mild"? Why not ban the alphabet?
And while he's at it, forbid the purchase of cigarettes unless patrons
enter a store and point at them mutely, while standing upside down on a
case of beer and reciting an ode to tofu.

The federal government is poised to legalize marijuana as an all-purpose
relaxant. It watches without a furrow in its health-caring brow as "the
greatest health-care system in the world" has waiting lists metastasizing,
and ambulances chased away from emergency rooms.

It sits as mute as moss and twice as lethargic, as explosive campaigns for
beer depict to the young the paradise of fornication and stupor that awaits
them with every cold and gassy swill. The roads still have their quota of
crashes, manglings and wasted lives -- inextricably linked to the access
and misuse of booze. In this, it's business as usual, and the advertising
in all its fleshy glory owns half the television time, three-quarters of
the sports teams and all the best billboard space in the country.

Crack, cocaine, heroin -- all the dreary life-wasters -- hardly ever get
the same glory of teeth-gritting dedication, or the intense piety of
exhortation, that burdens the softer narcotic. Vancouver's East Side (holy
Vancouver, so smoke-free an "environment") is still the pestilence it was
five years ago, with hookers and heroin and dereliction. The Health
Minister is not out on the East Side trying to rid Canada of that visible
scourge.

The federal government will do everything about smoking except the one
thing that would wash its hands: Stop receiving revenue from the vice. It
can't preach out of one mouth and ingest the swelling revenue with the other.

Still with my maxim, Toronto is going smoke-free. Again. In Toronto -- I do
not know what it's like in other smoke-free cities -- you may have your car
broken into, much damage done, things stolen, and if you report it, you'll
get voice mail. Leave your name and number. If you're lucky, maybe within
five days of leaving the message -- long after the villains have fled the
scene, perhaps the city -- you may get a callback. This may pass for
therapy in an Oprah age, but it is not police work.

No one will show up the same day to -- what is that word I'm looking for?
- -- oh yes, investigate. There is not even a pretense that some mauling of
your property, invasion of where you live or theft of your possessions will
actually trigger police work in Toronto.

Light a cigarette in a restaurant, though, and a bevy of smoke beadles and
Drabble graduates will be on you with the speed of a broken promise and the
attitude of Tom Wappel. Offend the anti-smoking despots in Toronto, and the
law in all its ridiculous abundance and insolence is there before the
second drag.

The message here is simple. Pass laws, levy fines, execute rigorously for
trendy moralistic novelties. Ignore pillage, intrusion and good
old-fashioned criminality.

Drench the nation with booze and its brandishments, the feds and Mr. Rock
are inert, vacant and unstirred. Zero tolerance for one vice, 100 per cent
tolerance for the other.

Someone smashes up your car and steals your goods -- that's your business.
Light up a cigarette -- that's everyone else's.

Fix the health-care system, eliminate the scourges of hard drugs and street
misery, moderate the flood of booze commercials -- then, maybe, Mr. Rock
will have the standing to debate "light" and "mild."

Send a cop when your car is broken into -- then, maybe, people won't be
lighting up in sheer frustration and anger over a city that has time for
trivial things but doesn't give a rat's rump about what counts.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's National Magazine and host of CBC
Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.