The purification of Colorado continues, as yet another simple pleasure was eliminated last week. It is now illegal to stroll into a tavern, put your foot on the rail, order a cold one and light up, just as it has been illegal for some time to celebrate Independence Day in the traditional way by igniting explosives.
The argument behind the smoking ban did not involve protecting the health of tavern patrons. After all, no one goes into a saloon to improve his physical health. Some of us may have noticed occasional mental-health benefits, but even if we depart in serenity after a few pleasant hours of imbibing whiskey with friends while cursing the Bush administration, we do not depart with improved stamina, strength or muscle tone.
But the argument did involve health – the health of the people who toil in taprooms. Their well-being had to be protected from second-hand smoke.
The easy solution is “if they don’t like the atmosphere at Smokey Joe’s Tavern, why don’t they get jobs at Lily Pure’s Lounge?”
But that’s not entirely fair, since most Coloradans probably believe that the government has some role in workplace health and safety. Over the years, we’ve learned that the free-market get-another-job approach can lead to tragedy: coal miners dying in explosions because the owners failed to ventilate the workings properly, truck drivers endangering themselves and other motorists after they’ve been on the road for 20 straight hours, industrial workers losing fingers and feet to unguarded moving machinery.
However, if employee health is the issue, then why were casinos exempted? Is the health of a bartender in Cripple Creek really less worthy of protection than than the well-being of a bartender in Salida?
Not if you believe the state is supposed to protect their health on the job. However, if you realize that a casino patron, if required to step away from the gambling table for a few minutes to smoke a cigarette outside, will consequently lose less money in the course of an evening, then you see the reason for the casino exemption.
So why is a casino’s revenue stream more worthy of protection than a neighborhood tavern’s?
That answer requires delving into the murky realm of lobbyists and campaign contributions, stuff that was never explained in your civics textbook, and what’s the point? The law is on the books, and we can only speculate as to where the Purity Lobby will strike next.
Their next assault will probably strike at home. It’s easy to see how adults who smoke indoors with children under 18 in the house could be defined as “child abusers.” Children will be encouraged to rat out their parents, and social workers would visit, searching without warrants (warrants are so 18th century, after all) for tobacco and paraphernalia like ashtrays and lighters. Then the kids would go to foster care, which is presumably better for them – at least by the lights of the Purity Lobby.
Then the Purity Lobby can go after outdoor smoking on private property, justified by the latest Surgeon General’s report that there’s no safe level of second-hand smoke. So if a microscopic fume wafts to your neighbor’s yard, you’re endangering his health, and your property should be confiscated since you’re misusing it.
After that, perhaps a full ban on the sale and use of tobacco products. Never mind that this hasn’t worked for any other substance, from marijuana to meth, but simple matters like practicality and personal choices have never bothered the Purity Lobby before.
Almost daily I get exposed to the statistics about the dangers of tobacco. But I never see numbers about how many people have died from the assaults of the Self-Righteous. It must be in the millions, though. We could start counting with the self-righteous Committee of Safety during the French Revolution and move through Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Stalin’s NKVD, Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, Mao’s Red Guards, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Let us not forget our own country’s self-righteous purification efforts with the heathen savages.
If you added it all up, Self-Righteousness has probably shortened many more lives than tobacco ever did. But perhaps the Self-Righteous get as much pleasure from their dangerous addiction as other people get from tobacco.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
