The Church of the Holy Smoke Haters

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

Joseph Bast, the author of Please Don’t Poop in My Salad ... and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking, takes on a powerful enemy—anti-smoking zealots—and shows why we should all resist their allegedly well-intentioned interference.

Fanatic members of the Church of the Holy Smoke Haters have a new catechism that says smokers are killing their kids with secondhand smoke, and everyone else for that matter. The new weapon is being used to justify smoking bans and higher taxes on tobacco products, but is it true? Bast points to medical research and court decisions that have exposed the secondhand smoke scare as junk science. A nonsmoker even in the smokiest of places is exposed to the equivalent of only one cigarette a day. There is no research that shows such a small exposure affects anyone’s health.

Nonetheless, the doctor, lawyer, schoolteacher, politician nanny crowd have taken up the chant. No more risks, no more deaths, no more smoke. They chant, they rant, they intimidate handwringing politicians into interfering in people’s lives. The new rule is, if you can smell it, it will kill you.

As an emergency room physician, I know what it takes to kill you. Secondhand smoke won’t.

Bast gives the prissies a couple of good Chicago jabs and reminds us of what should be the basic guiding rule of a free and civil society: Mind your own business and respect the rights of others to do what they please.

The Church of the Holy Smoke Haters is built on anxiety, the precautionary principle (the idea that if somebody fantasizes something bad could happen, we have to pass laws about it just in case), and the elitist belief that being smart, or thinking you are smart, gives you the right to make other people better by bossing them around.

Bast takes a couple of swings at modern elitist conceits and meddling attitudes, he discusses in a sensible way how they have generated junk science to get their way, and reminds us that there is more to civility than worrying about the loudest and most hypersensitive members of society.

My dad, a physician, smoked from the time he was 14 on the farm in Iowa, and in the latter part of his life had to go outside all the time in order to smoke—but the only time he suffered from smoking was when physicians misdiagnosed his lung infection because they assumed he was sick from the effects of cigarettes. Their biases and their prejudices got in their way.

That happens all the time on these moral battlegrounds, as Bast makes clear. Physicians are particularly dishonest about this, exaggerating effects of smoking because they want to win the argument and know they can claim to be on the side of justice and truth and morality—they are the priests of the High Church of the Holy Smoke Haters.

The anti-smoker crowd takes civility and courtesy out of the world. Just because they don’t like the smell of smoke, they want the police to close down restaurants that allow people to light up a cigarette after dinner—no matter what the owner of the property prefers and regardless of whether they would ever patronize the place.

Bast admits to smoking a Swisher Sweet cigar every night. He is right not to worry about the risk—there is none. A study of British physicians who smoked less than ten cigarettes a day showed they lived longer than nonsmokers. Cigarette smoke appears, in moderation, to be good for preventing dementia, colitis, and family quarrels, and it steadies the nerves.

Bast’s book does the same, and it supplies great ammunition against the Holier Than Thou Smoke Haters.

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