Posted by:
j3nnay
at Tue Feb 19 13:30:26 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by j3nnay ]
I believe something similar happened with alcohol. Remember, back in the 20s, there was this thing called Prohibition? Wives and mothers all over the country succeeded in having alcohol banned.
Alcohol affects your actual state of mind. It is a drug, a depressant, and it too results in deaths every year, not only from the effects it has on your body but in vehicle deaths and other accidents. Domestic violence can often be attributed to alcohol, as well as some of the stupidest things people can ever remember (or not remember) doing.
But for all those negative effects, people kept drinking alcohol anyway. Speak-easy's sprung up all across the country, and alcohol became even more popular. After a while it became obvious that prohibiting the substance was not doing anything to stop people from indulging. So, alcohol became legal again.
People like killing themselves. It's your choice, isn't it, to smoke? Well, it's my choice that in a public place, I don't want to breathe your smoke.
Say that in a hypothetical world, businesses could choose to be smoking or non smoking. What happens to the non smoker if the majority of businesses choose smoking? What happens when I can't go out to Applebee's because it's a smoking restaurant and I value my lungs? Non smoking and smoking sections are a joke - air mixes, you can't segregate air space.
My freedom to choose a restaurant is restricted for the sake of a smoker's freedom to kill themselves.
A smoker can still eat at a non smoking restaurant, they just have to go to the designated smoking area outside to have a smoke afterwards. Their freedom to choose a restaurant is not restricted at all - just their freedom to inflict smoke on other restaurant diners.
I think banning smoking in the restaurant is the lesser of the two evils there.
The tax on smoking is a luxury tax. You don't have to smoke, so if you didn't smoke, you wouldn't pay the tax. If raising the tax on cigarettes helps decrease that ridiculously large deficit the government operates in, I'm all for it.
~jenny
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"Polysyllabism in no way insures that what you're saying is actually worth being heard." - Blake (an e-friend of mine)
"I have never made but one prayer to god, a very short one: "O lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And he granted it." - Voltaire
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RE: The Brownshirts are at the gate.... - j3nnay, Tue Feb 19 13:30:26 2008