The Anti-Smoking Crusade’s Ugly Reality

Review of
Please Don’t Poop in My Salad ... and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking
by Joseph L. Bast, with a foreword by Joel Sherman
Chicago: The Heartland Institute, July 2006, 80 pages

I used to travel a lot. I remember one morning getting on a Delta fight to Atlanta out of Raleigh, North Carolina, hearing, as I shuffled through first class, some brassy, claxon-voiced woman claiming to all who would listen that she was allergic to cigarettes.

Well, being a polite “suthrun” gentlemen doctor, I held my tongue.

Knowing that there was and is no such thing as an allergy to cigarette smoke, I resisted grabbing her by her oversized larynx and instead moved back to the proletarian seats.

That day it became clear to me that smoking was doomed in our allegedly free society.

First it would be concern over allergies, then someone would concoct secondhand smoke research that claimed the world was dying from the smoke of other people’s cigarettes, and before long tobacco crop profits, handsome at the time, would be considered the wages of sin.

In Please Don’t Poop in My Salad ... and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking, Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, takes on meddlers such as this woman and shows why we should resist their allegedly well-intentioned interference. According to Bast, the anti-smoking campaign is part of a larger movement rolling back our freedoms in a wide variety of areas, making it of concern to smokers and nonsmokers alike.

For example, the continual reductions of blood alcohol content allowed for drivers is an obvious effort to cut down public social drinking, and the rapidly rising “sin” taxes are another part of the movement. Laws against foods that allegedly cause obesity—which is actually the product of overeating and insufficient exercise, not consumption of particular foods—are another incursion against freedom.

Bast debunks the basic idea behind all these crusades, the precautionary principle, which says it’s better to pass unnecessary laws than to take a chance that somebody, somewhere might have a problem of some sort. The precautionary principle justifies too much: Its muddled reasoning can be stretched to support virtually any new restriction on freedom and make reasoned debate over real risks and benefits impossible.

Bast notes that secondhand smoke, even in the smokiest of bars, is equivalent of one cigarette a day. There is no research anywhere that shows such a small exposure affects anyone’s health. But under the precautionary principle, if you can smell it, it will kill you. Well, I am an emergency physician, and I know what it takes to kill you. Secondhand smoke is not on the list.

Despite this reality, the doctor, lawyer, schoolteacher, politician nanny crowd has taken up the chant against secondhand smoke and invoked the precautionary principle: no more risks, no more deaths, no more smoke. They chant, they rant, and they intimidate handwringing politicians into interfering increasingly in our lives.

Bast’s book creates a nice, healthy space between the nannies’ attitudes and what should be the rule of a free and civil society: mind your own business, and quit claiming injuries based solely on your anxieties. The anti-smoking campaign is built on anxiety, the precautionary principle, and the elitist belief that being smart, or thinking you are smart, gives you the right to make other people better, and boss them around.

Bast exposes these modern elitist conceits and meddling attitudes and reminds us that civility is rather more substantial than worrying about the most hypersensitive, mouthy members of society. Find me a whiner and I’ll show you a taker, not a giver.

Actually, as Bast documents, the anti-smoking crowd takes civility and courtesy out of the world. It now seems that everyone with a college degree or a TV channel changer has been infected with the bug of telling other people how to live. Bast gives the bossy schoolteacher in all of us a little reminder that “mind your own business” is still the best approach to life.

John Dale Dunn, M.D., lives in Lake Brownwood, Texas.