When anyone writes anything positive about smoking, I can predict with deterministic confidence that some commenter with a dead or dying grandparent will appear to tell his story in the comments section. A wag would compare it to the deterministic confidence with which I can predict the increased likelihood of my developing lung cancer. I don’t have much hope of preempting the elegists’ chorus, but every reader should understand that I know you have a grandmother who died, and I’m sorry for your loss. I knew her too—all smokers know each other. We’re like Canadians. Anyway, commenters may start their engines.
Rather than an extended gripe about smoking bans in general—see David Hockney for that ("You get rid of smoking and everyone goes on anti-depressant pills; you think that’s better, I don’t")—I’ll narrow my scope and simply gripe about libertarianism’s shifting attitude towards tobacco. Six years ago, Reason produced a twenty-five minute film about smoking called "Talking Butts." It was, on the whole, positive about tobacco: it accused the US Postal Service of " therapeutic censorship "; it compared smoking to other risky and irrational behaviors like downhill skiing; it made John Waters sexy to straight women.
Imagine, then, my dismay when their new short film about tobacco took a softer line. Nick Gillespie’s most memorable quote in it: “I actually like smoking bans; I just don’t like it when the government does the banning." By his lights, smoking bans are mostly dangerous insofar as they open the door to other bans like outdoor grilling and trans-fats. It used to be that a willingness to defend irrational (or, if you prefer, a-rational) choices was common ground that traditionalists and libertarians could share. O tempora, o mores!
I don’t really mind that Gillespie doesn’t like the smell of tobacco. What I do mind is libertarianism’s new habit of affirming rationalist orthodoxies before adding, almost as an afterthought, that it’s not the government’s place. Look at the comments on Jacob Sullum’s latest Hit & Run post :
"The owners bitched when they proposed it, but since everyone had to comply - no one lost any business - the bars are still packed, and much nicer smelling. Before the ban - very few bars prohibited smoking, probably because the competition would undercut them by allowing it. But the whole dynamic was kind of a prisoners dilemma - and in my view a market failure (vast majority of people are better off with the ban)."By all means, keep spreading the word about smoking health effects—something has to be done to counteract Bill Hicks’ career —but smokers and their advocates should feel free to defend irrationality secure in the comfort that they’re in good company. After all, bohemians, daredevils, and international playboys don’t make sense either, and we love them for their anti-utilitarianism.
"The public health argument that this thread is about seems weak - I like the ban better on a nuisance line of reasoning."
Reason , very sadly, has become pro-sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll and anti-bohemian, the worst of both worlds. (And don’t get me started on how all truly great playboys are traditionalists and not libertarians.) I comprehend the libertarian position that enlightened hedonism is great because it makes so much sense —pleasure is self-evidently good, therefore I chase pleasure, QED—but they should know that, in making hedonism so eminently reasonable, they’ve broken with the great tradition of hedonists past. I’m not exactly complaining, since it leaves those hard-livin’ heroes to be claimed by bad trads like me, but there’s a part of me that wishes they knew what they were giving up by embracing rationalism. (For the record, Will called this development long before I did when he delivered this epigram: "Ayn Rand took Nietzsche’s philosophy and made it lame.")
I’ve defended smoking as an affirmative good before , not because I want people to start smoking—addiction is like soul, you got it or you don’t—but because I think that a full-throated defense of smoking as an irrational but nonetheless legitimate decision is the only way to stop smoking bans in a non-libertarian country like America. Opponents can take heart, though; "full-throated" isn’t much when you’re talking about smokers.
P.S. I should mention Tom Chiarella’s "He Started Smoking at 46" (h/t Crunchy Con ), which is just the kind of apologetics I wish more smokers would do. It’s especially heartwarming for conservative smoking advocates because it’s nice to have some maturity in our corner. According to conventional wisdom, cavalier young things like me think we’re going to live forever and so are allowed to hitch ourselves to the habit as long as we shut up about it; a 46-year-old, on the other hand, should know better! Maybe he is old enough to know better—old enough to have his priorities straight.
