Agree to Disagree
Norman Leahy
The cigarette ban was all over the news these last few weeks, as Governor Kaine and House Speaker Bill Howell reached what they call a compromise that would ban smoking at bars and restaurants statewide.
Seemed like a done deal. Or at least it was until the House, led by Del. Terry Kilgore, watered the bill down to such an extent that it was virtually meaningless. This measure then passed the House handily.
Pro-tobacco folks weren't entirely pleased and the public health priesthood was beside itself with rage. Usually, that's a recipe for legislative success – no one gets all they want and everyone feels somewhat used.
Except the Senate didn't want to play along and promptly stripped the amendments Kilgore and his colleagues had approved, placing the whole mess back where we started.
So will Virginia, a place that owes its very existence to the cultivation and sale of tobacco, finally make the leap toward an outright ban?
Probably not. Compromises will be reached, promises will be made and, once again, everyone will feel slightly used and abused when it's all over. But along the way, we will have learned a few things about our government, and few of them are pretty.
One is that the political class likes to have things both ways. Before the General Assembly session started, Governor Kaine proposed a doubling of the sales tax on cigarettes to help, by his thinking, defray the costs smokers inflict on the health care system. Meanwhile, he brought back the idea of the smoking ban in restaurants.
Tax it more, and then ban its use in public places. And you thought only greedy bank CEOs wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
But this isn't the only assault on tobacco in the session. In what can only be called an example of making the nanny state your co-pilot, the Senate (what's with those folks, anyway?) overwhelmingly passed a bill that makes it unlawful for a person to smoke in their car, even if it's parked, if a child is a passenger. Such a heinous crime would net you a $100 fine.
And if the dog's in the car, too, you'll probably get the chair.
In the midst of all this nonsense, some hardy few have dared to argue that the state has no business telling business owners how to run their establishments. It's a violation of property rights…jobs will be lost…our precious rights to privacy and free association are under assault.
They have a point, but it's an academic one, really. The banners have all the momentum on their side and they intend to lecture, hector and thoroughly nag us into doing things their way (your rights and property be damned).
Okay. Let's accept their arguments at face value. Ban smoking and we'll save lives. And maybe money, too.
What's next, then?
Shouldn't we go after those fatty snacks and soda pop? Those things are killers. Ban them all, or at least tax them to the hilt in order to save lives.
What about alcohol? We all know that excessive boozing destroys lives and property. Lord above, some people even have a tipple in front of the children! Ban it or tax it out of existence so we can all live longer, healthier, safer lives (it's for the children, you know).
And the list goes on – video games and television itself are grave threats to our children's competitiveness in what's left of the global economy. The Internet…hey, it's just a nest of perverts and Bulgarian spammers anyway…so let's shut it down! Cars? Gaia can't take any more of that nasty emission. Bicycles? Someone might fall and hurt themselves!
So maybe we should just stay indoors, right? Nope. The volatile compounds in the paint, the carpet, the paneling and, of course, the radon, are all going to either kill us or make us dumber than rocks. So you're sleeping under stars from now on (just make sure to wear your sunscreen during the day, otherwise that horrid sun will strike you dead with cancer).
And so it goes. When government gets in the business of banning something, we usually lose something even more important along the way. Get rid of cigarettes? Sure. Just be prepared to hand over the nachos next.
Norman Leahy is vice president for public affairs at Tertium Quids, a statewide, free market advocacy organization. He is a contributor to several Virginia political blogs, including Bacon's Rebellion, Sic Semper Tyrannis, Bearing Drift and NBC 12's Decision Virginia. A 2006 graduate of the Sorensen Institute, Norman and his family live in Henrico County.
Thad Williamson
I got a nice chuckle this week when Republican state delegate Lee Ware of Powhatan told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that he was opposed to a smoking ban in Virginia's restaurants, because he wanted the "ordinary guy who finishes a day of work" to be able to have a beer and a cigarette on the way home.
Nothing in the proposed smoking ban legislation stops that working man from doing just that. It just stipulates that he can't blow the smoke in a facility open to the public and thereby spread the risk of lung cancer to other people who just want to eat a meal, perhaps after their own day of work.
Such selective logic is typical of opponents of smoking bans who make appeals to "liberty" or "freedom." What about the liberty and freedom of parents of small children who want to be able to eat out without having having to worry if they are risking their children's health ?
And what about the principle that free choice requires full information? Following that principle consistently would call for large signs on the front doors of all restaurants allowing smoking saying "warning: second hand smoke causes cancer" and "unsafe for children." Such signs would let everyone know loud and clear what the deal is and then allow people to make informed choices. How come no one is standing up for that solution?
The more general issue is this: there is no such thing as absolute liberty (or absolute property rights either—I may own my house, but that doesn't give me the right to play "Stairway to Heaven" full blast on a 50 watt amp at 3 in the morning each night). The classic exposition and defense of individual liberty-- John Stuart Mill's On Liberty-- stipulated that society should be very, very wary about intervening into decisions individuals make that affect their own lives, even when we have good reason to think they are making bad choices. That's the intuition that opponents of a smoking ban are appealing to.
But Mill explicitly denied that this presumption in favor of liberty extended to actions that affect other persons in non-trivial ways. Here he made an important distinction between offense and harm. Offense means that you don't like someone else's actions. Mill effectively argued that the fact that someone is offended by another person's action is no reason to restrict that person's liberty to keep performing that action. I get offended when I see misguided street preachers who think the best way to advance the Christian gospel is to tell everyone they are going to hell, but I have no right to walk over to the nearest policeman and ask him or her to get the preachers to stop offending me.
The case of cigarette smoke isn't like that. Second-hand cigarette smoke involves real harm to the health of persons who don't chose to take a risk with their own bodies by lighting up. Second-hand smoke is estimated to kill nearly 50,000 non-smoking adults a year in the United States —more than the total number of deaths from car accidents. Consequently, the presumption of liberty simply does not extend to the right of smokers to inflict harm on other persons they do not know in public spaces.
Some may respond that by walking into a restaurant in Virginia, you are consenting to the risk of second-hand smoke. That argument reflects a twisted sense of freedom in which our liberty is maximized when we are forced every time we enter a public space to calculate the relative risk of second-hand smoke on our long-term health is and decide whether we feel like taking that risk right now. The point of a smoking ban is to allow people the freedom to enter any public space they like without having to worry that their health is going to be endangered by their decision to do so.
But the real reason why the Virginia legislature has been so reluctant for so long to follow the lead of dozens of other states and implement, as a basic public health step, a public smoking ban has little to do with misguided conceptions of what individual liberty does and does not entail.
In fact, it has everything to do with the continued power of the tobacco lobby in this city and in this state. Philip Morris doesn't want to lose a battle in its backyard, and hence ( as was well documented in an excellent Washington Post article on Monday) has been working hard to water down the smoking ban bill.
Fortunately Tim Kaine has drawn a bit of a line in the sand by insisting on a bill that at least requires restaurants permitting smoking sections to have a separate ventilation system for the smoking space will get his support. It would be humiliating for the governor to sign on to the watered-down bill (requiring that smoking sections simply be separated by a door and exempting altogether adults-only establishments) that industry wants.
Likewise, in this political context, getting a meaningful smoking ban passed would be a significant accomplishment and another milestone in the gradual decline of the tobacco industry.
The tobacco lobby is certainly not going to vanish overnight. But it will represent real progress when elected officials here in Virginia show a willingness to put public health first, rather than cave to pressure from an industry whose products when used as directed are likely to kill you and harm the health of the people around you .
Thad Williamson is an assistant professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. After growing up in Chapel Hill, N.C., he earned his bachelor's degree at Brown University, a master's degree in theology from Union Theological Seminary (New York) and a doctorate in political science from Harvard University. He is the author of three books and has written on public affairs for numerous national publications.
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