Drugs such as alcohol, chewing tobacco and heroin only kill the people that choose to abuse them...they don't usually affect people in the surrounding area. Cigarette smoke isn't so fickle: It kills everyone around it -- and at much more lethal rates than a motorcycle or a Ford Explorer.

When people argue that industrial air pollution is a bigger problem, I say that State and Federal agencies are currently taking steps to try to contain smog, and will probably have eliminated more than half of it within the next five years (depending on whether we get a liberal or a conservative Congress). While the Feds, the states and environmental groups are working on the gasoline/industrial pollution problem, I am trying to do a similar thing on the local level, targeting indirect smoke from cigars and cigarettes (thinking global -- acting "loco"...).

Here's the bottom line:

In order to protect itself from physical harm -- whether it's nuclear fallout or carcinogens from indirect smoke -- even a totally Libertarian society has the right (and obligation) to protect its own. If you want to say that smoking is okay if one chooses to do it in the privacy of their own home, I'll agree -- but not when you put other innocent people in that home with them.

Just as you wouldn't think of allowing your next-door neighbors to kill their children quickly with a gun, shouldn't you be just as strict about them killing others (including their children) slowly with proven harmful carcinogenic cigarette smoke? If they were doing the harm a little quicker with Carbon Monoxide gas, would you stand by and defend their freedom to do this?  I think not. Cigarettes just happen to take longer.

Just how harmful, dangerous and toxic are cigarettes? The answer is in every medical journal in the modern world, and in every set of statistical research done in the last thirty years: cigarettes are as addictive as heroine, and as lethal (by any definition of harmful) as any toxin, poison or weapon-of-death out there -- only slower.

You must then ask yourself this: Am I defending the "rights" of people to kill themselves and others around them, only because the resultant deaths are being caused by a "slow-motion" weapon? Maybe they're guilty only of "manslaughter" because they just "didn't know"... Tell them to READ the PAPER. Ignorance of these stats is now no excuse.

To argue that it is okay for people to smoke because everyone else does it, and because it's accepted in society, is real pretzel logic!

So Smokers-Rights Activists!! Get out there and DEFEND the rights of those slow-mo guns we benevolently call cigarettes, butts or smokes -- Be hypocrites: While you're at it, go execute Jeffrey Dalmer, and throw that lady who drove her kids into the lake a few years ago in jail, and get angry at the drunken husband who beats his wife to death -- get pissed -- because those people kill faster, and, of course, the harm they're doing is not legal the way cigarettes are. But keep in mind, please, that the results are still the same...death...only much slower...I repeat, the results are still the same, and all we are talking about here is results.

To those of you who write to me complaining about smokers' rights, I strongly suggest that you spend some of that precious time of yours supporting the rights of subjects that are probably much less harmful, (whether it's porn, or cannabis, gay rights or the right to listen to any record or watch any movie you damn well please) and write your next complaint letter to Walmart.