Previous Issues
The weed
?Legislation at every level of government has gotten progressively tougher over the last few decades on smokers, tobacco retailers, cigarette manufacturers and even tobacco farmers. The last salvo locally came Monday when council banned smoking within 10 metres of a municipal playground (see page 12).
For four centuries, from the time when Sir Walter Raleigh first introduced tobacco to the Elizabethan court, until the 1950s when it was, oh so cool to smoke and highly unusual if you didn’t, there were virtually no restrictions on smoking whatsoever. “Second-hand smoke” was a cigarette that got passed around among kids - on the playground! - and cigarette ads were among the cleverest both on TV and in the magazines. The Marlboro man was the quintessence of machismo.
Then, hard to say exactly when it began, scientists started to tell us about the incredibly ugly consequences of smoking. Before long, no-smoking sections began to appear in restaurants and bars, and on airplanes. Not long after that (in the fullness of time), the entire restaurant or airplane was non-smoking.
Not only was cigarette advertising banned, cigarette packages themselves were obliged to carry messages which essentially told the purchaser he was an idiot for doing it (not that governments weren’t very happy to take a large hunk of your payment in the form of a tax).
The options of where a smoker could pursue his socially unacceptable habit became narrower and narrower. Not in the office. Not on the commuter train, or even in the train station. Not in the hockey arena, or the bowling alley, or the community hall, or the political convention (so much for “smoke-filled rooms”). Not in a car with a child in it. Not even in your own home, if you have a young child.
So why don’t politicians take the logical next step and ban smoking altogether? If tobacco was a food, drug or other consumable just coming onto the market, it wouldn’t stand a chance. Potential producers would abandon it immediately as totally unmarketable. So why don’t we apply the same standards to it that we apply to over-the-counter medications, or meat products, or Chinese toys? Maple Leaf sausages killed a handful of people across the country, and millions of dollars of product, probably most of it perfectly harmless, was yanked off the shelves without hesitation.
Meanwhile, tobacco continues to kill thousands of people every year, and every single cigarette has the potential to administer the coup de grace. Yet all we do is hide the cigarettes a little farther behind blank cupboard doors, and make more stringent laws against selling to minors, all the while knowing that these days, the vast majority of smokers are too young to really know any better.
Has the time come to turn the tobacco fields over to soy beans? It would probably have to become a simultaneous international ban, otherwise smuggling would become very lucrative and very nasty. But would it be worth it? We’d be interested in hearing your point of view, whether you’re a smoker or not.
