News Blog

Not to sound like Bill O’Reilly by proclaiming “wars” on things, but it appears there really is a war on cigarette smokers in America. I feel compelled to begin by saying that smoking is harmful to your health and leads to lung cancer, emphysema and bad breath. And kids, it doesn’t make you look older or cooler. In theory, the prohibition of smoking in public places seems reasonable as one of the fundamental roles of government in a civilized society is protecting one citizen from the harm of another. So in the case of a bar, restaurant or any other enclosed space where a non-smoker can be harmed by a smoker’s cigarette, it seems fair enough that lawmakers protect non-smokers from the effects of cigarette smoke. The problem I had with city-wide smoking bans, like the one in New York City, wasn’t that bars are going to suck without smoking, but rather that once you give smoke-free activists an inch, they take a mile. And sometimes more like 3 miles. A New York Times story Monday depicts the newest trend in the war on smokers, a push by various legislative bodies and real estate companies to ban smoking inside people’s homes. According to the Times, this year two California cities banned smoking inside individual units of residential buildings and two major real estate companies with holdings in various states have followed suit. Moreover, thousands of individual housing complexes are imposing bans on cigarette smoke inside apartments, on balconies and on rooftops. First of all, it always strikes me ridiculous that California, the state that contains the 12 most polluted counties anywhere in America in terms of air quality, complains so much about cigarette smoke. Second and most important, when did Americans surrender their individual property rights to the smoke-free movement. Granted, I live in China, but I missed this memo on this. The Flumesday Legal Correspondent researched this issue and found that the Fair Housing Act, part of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, expressly outlaws “interfering with a person’s enjoyment or exercise of housing rights based on discriminatory reasons.” And while this correspondent holds no credible legal degree, he does pull up some nice facts. Smoking isn’t against the law and a local government doesn’t have the right to tell people they can’t do it behind closed doors. And if the basis is that it damages the air quality of the hallway outside of the apartment, then by that same principle, my housing complex in Shanghai would be justified in prohibiting my neighbor from cooking nasty-smelling shit every evening at around six. The point is, Americans pride themselves on freedom and are so quick to throw epithets like “fascist” and “police state” at their ideological enemies, namely the Chinese. But instead of worrying about how China should become more like the U.S., Americans should begin to worry about how the U.S. is becoming more like China.