Anti-smoking advocate stands up for personal rights
If you smoke you’re well aware that there are fewer and fewer places where you’re allowed to do it. You’ve been kicked out of bars, restaurants, and even – I’ll never understand this one – outdoor stadiums. Last year there was even a bill to ban smoking in multi-unit residences like apartment buildings and condominiums.
So the fact that policies are being introduced that could prohibit employers from hiring smokers is really the next logical step for eager, socialistic politicians.
Whatever you may think of smoking – it’s still 100 percent legal! And yet, at least one company in the U.S. has had the unmitigated gall to not only stop hiring smokers, but to make smoking OUTSIDE THE WORKPLACE a fireable offense! This same company has even tried to extend this ban to the spouses of its employees.
They’ve gone too far this time – and that’s not just the opinion of an old pro-smoker’s right advocate. Finally, someone from the other side of the fence – noted tobacco control advocate Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health – believes that banning the hiring of smokers takes things too far. Whether you’re a smoker or not, at the end of the day, these bans are attacks on personal rights.
Siegel points out that while people are eager to agree with almost any anti-smoking law (wow … what took him so long to figure that out?), he doesn’t believe that “people have thought through the negative consequences” of these policies.
As I’ve often said, smoking bans are the first step on a slippery slope toward the obliteration of our individual rights. The simpletons in Congress and the Senate are often more concerned with celebrating our rights than protecting them. The smoke-free lobby seems to neither realize nor care that many of the bans that they promote are unconstitutional.
Siegel and University of Washington professor Brian Houle have written a study examining what these kinds of policies could mean. For example, they point out that if these policies were to take root nationwide, it could cause many smokers not only to lose their livelihood, but also their healthcare.
Apparently, the trend toward smoking bans has caused a kind of rift even among the smoke-free zealots. Siegel says that he and his co-author Houle along with many who agree with them are apt to be labeled as “traitors to the cause.”
Siegel believes it’s important that his fellow tobacco control advocates avoid allowing their ultimate goal of a smoke-free world to “cloud our vision about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
“This represents employment discrimination,” he says. “And I believe, from a public- health perspective, we need to shun that.” I just hope Siegel can clear the metaphorical smoke out of the eyes of other anti-smoking fascists.
