WHAT THE ANTISMOKING ZEALOTS REALLY CRAVE

A question for antitobacco militants: Why do you draw the line at private
homes?

To protect nonsmokers, especially young ones, you've made it illegal to
smoke in more and more places. You have banished smoking from tens of
millions of private workplaces; from airplanes and buses; from most
government buildings. You have gotten hundreds of cities - Boston is your
latest conquest - to ban smoking in restaurants altogether. In California,
you've even driven smokers from bars.

But smoking at home is OK.

Curious, no? You militants routinely justify your crusade by claiming to
act for "the kids," yet in the one place a kid is likeliest to encounter
cigarettes, smoking is wholly unregulated. Why? It can't be because you
respect the rights of private property owners. After all, restaurants and
bars are private property. And it can't be because the state never
interferes in the way parents raise their children - the state interferes
in everything from the commercials children see on television to the paint
that goes on their walls. So why aren't you clamoring to take away parents'
freedom to smoke at home?

Granted, that would just about outlaw all smoking. But isn't that what you
want?

One of the nation's foremost antismoking activists, Stanton Glantz,
compares cigarette manufacturers to Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer of
Oklahoma City. A New York Times reporter likens tobacco employees to "the
guards and doctors in the Nazi death camps." Over a decade ago, the Journal
of the American Medical Association was calling for "a declaration of
all-out war" against the perpetrators of "the tobaccoism holocaust."

Such murderous rhetoric is typical. On taxpayer-funded billboards in
California, a man about to light up asks, "Mind if I smoke?" The woman
replies: "Care if I die?" Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on
Science and Health says smoking kills more people than "if every single day
two filled-to-capacity jumbo jets crashed, killing all on board." A former
director of the Centers for Disease Control has predicted that "the annual
global death toll of tobacco will equal the total death toll of the
Holocaust in Nazi Germany."

Such hysteria is more than repugnant, it is false. In "For Your Own Good"
(Free Press), a lucid and superbly researched new book on the antitobacco
jihad, journalist Jacob Sullum pinpoints the deceit:

"The rhetoric of tobacco's opponents implies a rough equivalence between a
65-year-old smoker who dies of lung cancer and a 40-year- old businessman
killed in a plane crash, a 19-year-old soldier shot in the trenches of
World War I, or a child murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. But there is a
big difference between someone who dies suddenly at the hands of another
person or in an accident and someone who dies as a result of a long-term,
voluntarily assumed risk."

Maybe so, you antismoking activists might say, but the harm caused by
smoking isn't limited to the smoker. His smoke poisons everyone he comes
into contact with. They shouldn't be made to suffer because of his vile
habit. Nonsmokers have a right to a smoke-free society.

In fact, the danger of secondhand smoke is more myth than science. Most
epidemiological studies have found no statistically significant link
between lung cancer and secondhand smoke. Exposure to cigarette fumes may
not be good for your health, but the medical fact is that secondhand smoke
is not likely to do lasting harm to anyone.

Still - what about those kids growing up in smokers' homes? How can you
sworn enemies of tobacco be so intent on criminalizing the smoke in smoky
jazz bars, yet do nothing about the millions of children whose parents
light up with abandon? Why don't you demand that cigarettes be outlawed in
any house with kids? In other words, why don't you demand that cigarettes
be outlawed - period?

Maybe the answer is that even zealots like you realize it wouldn't work.
Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s was a hideous failure, drenching the
country in corruption, crime, and oceans of impure alcohol. In a nation
with 45 million smokers, Tobacco Prohibition would be no less a disaster,
and most of you know it.

Or maybe the answer is that you couldn't afford to end smoking entirely.
Ban all tobacco, and there'd be no tobacco taxes or (legal) tobacco
profits. No profits or taxes, no hundreds of billions of dollars to fund a
settlement. No gusher of dollars for new "health care" programs. No bonanza
for plaintiffs' lawyers. No lavish budgets for all your antitobacco
outfits. No goose. No golden eggs.

But I think the real answer is that you don't think you can get away with
it - yet. Already some of you are targeting smokers' homes. At least one
law review article has claimed that parents who expose their children to
tobacco smoke "should be viewed as committing child abuse." A Pennsylvania
legislator has proposed a ban on smoking in any vehicle carrying a minor.
More intrusion is on its way.

Nicotine may be pleasurable, but it's nothing like the high of forcing
others to behave the way you want them to. Power over other people's
pleasures is very addicting, isn't it? "The true nature of the crusade for
a smoke-free society," Sullum writes, is "an attempt by one group of people
to impose their tastes and preferences on another." It's illiberal, it's
vindictive, it's intolerant. It's you.