Editorial: It’s About Non-Smokers’ Rights [03/31-5]

Excerpts from: It’s about non-smokers’ rights

By Man Morrow The Sagamore [03/31/04]


Non-smokers often puzzle about the morbid logic exuded by smokers as they proclaim the alleged “right” to smoke. I myself used to wonder considerably about that as I watched both my parents die slowly, painfully, from smoking.

They would lie there in their very expensive hospital beds in the intensive care ward and hack and wheeze and gasp for their last breaths with tubes sticking out of them. One of the last things my father ever said to me was that he was not addicted to nicotine.

It was a very bad time for me, and it left me with the lifelong struggle as to just how to cope with tobacco in general – the stink, the infernal cigarette butts that litter the ground, the smokers scowling down at the side-walk behind Cavanaugh Hall as they puff away their health and the health of everybody around them.

Smokers, when suddenly they feel the pinch of new public smoking regulations, rely on the adage that “smokers have rights, too.” It is a knee-jerk reaction, really, to what is a very strong argument being made by a great many metropolitan communities and virtually every health professional in the world. That is, smoking is a dangerous thing. This is why broader smoking regulations on campus are necessary in protecting students from second-hand cigarette smoke.

Somehow, media have allowed the argument “smokers have rights too,” to go unchallenged. But now, as we anticipate new restrictions on public smoking at IUPUI, it is the time for the adage to be challenged. Is it indeed true? Do smokers have the “right” to pollute the air and litter the ground? And worse, do they have the “right” to contribute to the hundreds of health problems that second-hand smokers suffer?

Let’s see. The Constitution does not guarantee the right to smoke. Neither does the State of Indiana. Nor does Marion County. It does not seem to be a right with which one is born. It is not a credit that one earns after turning 13 as a rite of passage, or through some supreme sacrifice like military service, or 20 long years at the company, or anything like that. There is nothing about smoking in the United Nations Charter. The Bible does not seem to give the impression that smoking is, in any way, okay. No lawyers, police officers or judges have ever told me that I have a right to smoke.

I’m beginning to think that smoking is not a right that is guaranteed by anyone, anywhere. In fact, smokers’ rights end where another person’s right to be smoke free begins.

The logic that smoking is a right is flawed. We are not explicitly guaranteed many rights by law. For the most part, a behavior is allowed if there is no rule against it. Laws exist to limit behaviors, actions and policies that are damaging to people. Research has proven that smoking is dangerous not only for those who choose to smoke, but for anyone who breathes in the contaminated air.

This is why smokers must acknowledge their right to smoke ends where another person’s begins.

The smoker reaches into her pocket, retrieves a small red and white box that contains 4000 toxic chemicals, removes some of those chemicals and then puts them into her mouth and sets them on fire.

With the obvious absurdity of that understood, it becomes clear as to just why nobody ever sought to make that behavior a right.

This information is presented as a public service by:

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
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A national nonprofit, scientific and educational organization founded in 1967.
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Dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Warren Wells