Tobacco Nannies: The Mask Comes Off

The mask has fallen: America's Tobacco Taliban is now pushing for laws to eradicate smoking. All smoking.

Let me spell that out, because I understand your disbelief. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), one of the country's most influential anti-tobacco pressure groups, advocates a complete smoking ban.

"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" roars John F. Banzhaf III, the group's Great Leader, as seductively as men with bulging neck veins, drunk on their own totalitarian impulses, know how.

Banzhaf wants to go all-out. No compromises. No smoking anywhere. Including in your home. Not on your porch. Not in your living room. Nor in the crapper, the toolshed, or the garage. He wants you never to light up, under penalty of law, even when there are no children present, and even when your closest non-smoking neighbor lives ten miles down the road.

Over the span of only about a dozen years, the message spread by Banzhaf and his ilk has morphed from the blandly pleasant "Please don't smoke if you think it could bother others" to an outright threat: "Give me those fags, dirtbag, or I'm battering your front door down."

They said it would never come to this, that they were really only in it to stop smokers from affecting the lungs of non-smokers. Oh no, they weren't against liberty and choice at all, they claimed, on the contrary; they came to protect liberty and choice — of those with an entirely reasonable aversion to tobacco. People with asthma and allergies; people with sensitive eyes and throats and noses.

And although maybe we never quite believed that they would stop at the thresholds to our homes, and although we knew enough to distrust them for the disturbing zeal of their crusade and the cooked statistics with which they armed themselves, we let them advance, inch by inch.

So now the ugly mug of busybody fascism, of which we'd caught many fleeting glimpses before, has revealed itself in all its loathsome, self-congratulatory, all-too-familiar smugness — oozing hatred and fanaticism, and laughing.

[h/t Jacob Grier]

Comments

[Michael J. McFadden]

You've got him (and them) pegged to a T Rogier. It's not really all that new though: over two years ago Banzhaf told Newsweek,

“Here we are literally reaching into the last frontier -- right into the home... No longer can you argue, 'My home is my castle. I've got the right to smoke.' ”

The writing's been on the wall for quite a while... unfortunately not too many have noticed.

Michael J. McFadden
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"
http://encyclopedia.smokersclub.com/130.html

[harleyrider1978]

In only 21 words, the Ninth Amendment says:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to deny
or disparage others retained by the people."

I will make a declaration that I retain the right to smoke in public places, I further empower this declaration with the fact that as the founding fathers sat and wrote this constitution they smoked tobacco in a public building and by their so doing, makes their smoking of tobacco and the citizens smoking of tobacco in public spaces a constitutional right to be practiced by we the people at our own discretion.

[Martin Owens]

Thank God the Supreme Court won't let them take away our guns. Looks like we're gonna need 'em, and sooner than we think....