I am a fairly pacifistic, or to the unbelievers, at least a rather passive man. There are very few things that get my goat, them being (in no particular order): censorship in any form, any artistic endeavor that happened after 1997 (the year I am perpetually stuck in) and, more to the subject at hand, the current fad of witch-hunting and ostracizing smokers.
I started smoking when I first got a summer job and realized that smokers had the unfair advantage of frequent “smoke breaks.” As funny as it seems now, my addiction didn’t stem from a lingering interest in looking cool, but rather from my own inherent slavishness and determination to waste away as much time as anyone else while working. Being a cheap miser by nature, I can only defend the endless amount of money I’ve wasted on cigarettes by reminding you that they are a good deal in the long run; I will die sooner than everyone else, and thus save on expenses that come with old age.
Now it seems the world has gone cold turkey, with an emphasis on the poultry part. Smoking is prohibited from all places of social gathering, and the few remnants of that ancient brotherhood of nicotine are at worst looked down upon by society as sub-human simpletons, or at best as Satanic heathens. BU smoking rooms, creepily lit dungeons to begin with, are left forlorn, forgotten and unused. Second-hand smoke pollution, a surefire way to get cancer, remains a heated issue, whereas second-hand cell phone noise pollution, a surefire way to get a nervous breakdown, so far remains unchecked. In the old days, smoking was cool. But now I can clearly imagine the next James Dean coming up to me, looking me in the eye and telling me in a reproachful, disappointed tone that I should try the patch.
The demonizing of smokers has gone to such extremes that I can remember occasions of being greeted by a stranger’s smile while walking down the street, only to see that same smile quickly drag into a disappointing scowl when the eyes noticed the cigarette in my hand. Society has done everything in its power to banish smokers like Morlocks, at first with our own special “rooms” (read: quarantines), and then by eliminating smoking rooms altogether. Even exiled outside, we are shown no great amount of warmth by non-smokers. Although I know it is with great pain that some of you must go through a cloud of our smoke to enter a building, I feel fit to remind you that we smokers did not volunteer to go down seven flights of stairs to huddle by the wall of our dorms in sub-zero temperatures at the dead of night, and, already being fully aware of how foolish it is for us to crave tobacco so much to do so, you elite non-smokers should not be surprised if we don’t welcome your repulsion with some animosity.
But anti-smoking sentiments have conquered the world, and with Ireland surprisingly banning butts, I feel a looming doom in the near future – and it isn’t the cancer. Ireland was once my “safety school” of expatriatism – should the U.S. commit mass genocide on all smokers (before we’re likely to do it on ourselves). Now the only country vehemently outspoken against the ban is France, whose hedonists and womanizers nearly rioted over a cigarette tax that came up last year. Fortunately for myself, my home state of Rhode Island will likely be the last to pass banning, as we were the last ones to sign the Declaration of Independence, and are equably as knee-deep in corruption as we are in thick-headedness.
My anxiety now overtly present, allow me to list some reasons, some obvious and some questionable, on why banning smoking everywhere is generally a bad idea: For one, most of the social places where smoking is banned are places that one is not obligated to go, such as bars, where, for second, most of the staff smoke anyway and thus do not care about a healthy working environment because they themselves are not healthy. For third, until smoking is banned altogether, the second-hand smoke gathered outside where clusters of smokers hibernate will far outdo the damage done by second-hand smoke confined to a single cancer-ridden room. Finally, banning cigarettes would also ban any smoking in general, and that should frighten anyone trying to legalize a certain smokable green plant in the future.
Now of course smoking is crucially harmful to you; of course it is probably the stupidest thing you can possibly do to yourself of your own free will. But when I smoke, it is not without a certain sense of cynicism of the world situation; I see wars all over, injustice all over, the environment nearly crippled, taxes increasing, people starving, terrorists bombing and plotting, atomic warfare looming, not to mention the various toxins we eat and pollution we breathe just by living in a city, and I can’t help thinking that maybe I’ll have more on my plate to worry about even before I begin to worry about my addiction – which, despite trends otherwise, is still harmlessly labeled a “habit.”
Patrick May, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.