Non-smokers can avoid outdoor irritants
by Pete Cunningham
*As printed December 26, 2007 in The Homer Index   

The Calhoun County Department of Public Health recently approved the Clean Indoor Air Regulation. The regulation officially banned smoking in all private and public workplaces, with the exception of restaurants, bars and tobacco specialty stores. Also included in the new regulation is a stipulation which bans smoking within 25 feet of entryways or ventilation systems.

Formally banning smoking in the workplace is long overdue. Anyone who doesn’t want to breathe in the smelly, disgusting air of cigarette smoke while earning a paycheck shouldn’t have to. When you factor in that constant exposure to secondhand smoke makes people more susceptible to serious health complications such as lung cancer, the workplace ban seems like a no-brainer.

What makes far less sense is the stipulation which prohibits smoking at such an arbitrary distance from doorways and ventilation systems. Where is the research that suggests this magical number is the difference between breathing fresh and clean air? Putting the onus on business owners to enforce such distances is equally ridiculous. If oil was struck 24 feet from the entryway of a business, the owner certainly would not have a right to the splendor. If a business owner requested someone stay 22 feet away from their ventilation system, police would sooner arrest the business owner for disturbing the peace than write a trespassing ticket.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” When I spoke with Calhoun County health officer Dottie-Kay Bowersox, she justified the 25 foot rule by essentially saying the fist of the secondhand smoke is delivering unrecoverable haymakers to innocent pedestrians.

Even a defiant Pinocchio leaving an FBI interrogation could avoid the air of a smoker with any sort of reasonable effort. If you think that this is too much of an inconvenience, the problem isn’t your nose being violated, but the direction which it is pointed.

Smoking may be gross. Smoking may be disgusting. Smoking is definitely unhealthy, but one thing smoking is not, is despicable. Enacting Gestapo-like tactics to control people from puffing away while outside seems a waste of any resources committed to such, and citing the prevention of the dangers of secondhand smoke is an irresponsible overextension of the research on secondhand smoke. Nonetheless, a precedent is being set statewide with the appearance of an effort to stop smoking altogether.

This will never be a reality and these regulations are simply adding mirrors to the smoke that will forever loom in our world. Michigan enjoyed $1.169 billion in revenue from the tobacco tax in 2006, more than 70 percent of which was earmarked for Medicaid and the School Aid fund. The state doesn’t want to see that money go away and would face a catastrophe tenfold of that experienced in Lansing this year if it ever did.

Smoking is a necessary evil. Governments and individuals need it for money and, as painful as it is to admit, with a forever growing average life expectancy we also need it to - as Ebenezer Scrooge would say - decrease the surplus population.

Smoking is the villain. But, without villains, who would our superheroes be? Without the Joker, Batman is just some weirdo Goth who hangs out on top of buildings all night, and without Lex Luther Superman is just plain old Clark Kent; a second-rate news reporter who annoys everyone by always showing up “faster than a locomotive” with pen and pad in tow. God knows we already have too many of those.