The Debate On Smoking In Restaurants

I have relationships with people who dwell in both camps. I have a grandfather who campaigns in his city to have smoking banned from restaurants, and I have friends here in town who are miffed because they now have to stand outside to smoke when they eat at their favorite social spot. Personally, I'm not really affected either way so the debate has very little to do with me, but let's just try for a moment to take a look at things from a neutral perspective.

On one hand, you have credible organizations like The Cancer Society and The Heart & Stroke Foundation telling us that smoking is extremely bad for you (not really news to anyone). The real kicker is that they say that 3000 people die each year because of second-hand smoke, alone. Man, that's a morbid number, but where did it come from? In early '98, the World Health Organization published a study that did indeed confirm that "passive smoking causes lung cancer in non-smokers", but ... it turns out that as far as numbers are concerned, the risk wasn't "statistically significant". Go figure. So you can imagine how some people jumped on some parts of the study, and how some other people would want to focus on the rest. Then you have WHO press releases like this, with the title leaning one way and the body going in a completely different direction - people start to get confused. Nobody knows what to believe.

The magical "3000 deaths" comes from a lot of hard work. Firstly, what some people do is scale out the "16%" from the WHO study to the population the size of the United States, which works out to be somewhere between 1000-1200 theoretical deaths from second-hand smoke. Then things get really liberal. If you died from an illness, and you happened to live with a smoker, your death is counted as "probably/may have died from second-hand smoke". Keep that up, and you've arrived at 3000. The wonderful world of half-truths. An anti-tobacco ad is a lot sexier if it says something like "the population equal to a small town is wiped out each year from second-hand smoke", rather than "second-hand smoke slightly increases your health risks, but you really don't even need to worry about it".

Luckily we have several counter-studies that we can use for comparison in our debate, right? ... right? Shit no. Enter the failing tobacco companies, supreme overlords of finding innovative ways to make money off of human suffering and indulgence. I guess that's a little harsh, to be fair, but I mean come on - you can only force a tobacco company to admit that there even is a health risk from smoking at all if you twist their arm all the way back over the top of their head. So it's not like their own idea of "truth" is going to be any less biased or scientifically sound than the other guys.

Restaurants citing business models that 'prove' they will lose business if they force their smoking clientel to go outside, municipalities coming up with rediculous by-laws that are just dragged down in red tape - for something people are so passionate about, you'd think somebody would actually take the time to take their own argument seriously.

What we end up with are two very angry groups, arguing over restaurant tables throughout the nation and neither is afraid to fudge science in their favour. One day, a man smoking during his meal so irritates the man sitting next to him, that the second man throws down his fork and leaves the diner forever. The next day, a couple is standing outside in the snow while the rest of their friends remain behind inside where it's warm.

So far all this has done is force one person to accept the ideals of another person, and that's not really fair. What if one day I decided that because I can't stand Pop Rock, it should be forever banned from the radio? Apparently all I would need to do is get together enough political backing, crap some 'science' out of my ass, and put a nice spin on it all. A little bit of money, and before you know it it's a federal regulation. I just made you accept the world in my own image, and it didn't take much (by today's standards).

How you feel about smoking - whether you hate it more than anything, or if you think it's the greatest thing in the world - is actually pretty irrelevant. No person has the right to force people to live their lives a certain way. That principle is at the very point of being alive - personal choice, freedom. The purpose of the law is to protect people, not to control them.

Now I'm not suggesting you go out there and be a selfish prick, either. We're all pretty much stuck here together, so the least we can do is find some way to get along. Rather than looking at this topic of second-hand smoke in public spaces as purely black or white, I think the solution lies in some form of compromise. Regardless of what the short term holds (apologies go out to my friends standing out in the cold), I think that you will find that things will even out in the end.