©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Smokers are people ... who should be segregated
by LEN LEAR

Local Life editor, Len Lear, clearly gets no respect as co-workers expel their chemical poisons into his face. What ever happened to the good old days when attempts were rarely made to snuff out the lives of editors? (Photo by Jimmy J. Pack Jr. — a non-smoker)

Chestnut Hill resident D.G. Hart can obviously write well (“Smokers are people, too” in the May 4 Local), so I assume he was being deliberately disingenuous — rather than just ignorant — when he argued that it is just as unfair to discriminate against smokers like him as it would be to discriminate against people who eat hamburgers, pizza, bacon, etc., in restaurants. (The Tobacco Institute, a trade association that represents the lethal tobacco industry, has often made the same silly argument in its literature.)

“Of course, smoking contributes to heart disease,” Hart wrote. “But so do hamburgers, bacon, pizza, beer, whiskey and a host of other things served at bars and restaurants. Is anyone seriously considering closing these places because they serve food and beverages known to contribute to heart disease? Not really.”

Assuming there is someone out there who has not employed his/her brain in years and therefore might be susceptible to this specious argument, I would offer the following rebuttal: I am as much in favor of freedom of choice as anyone, so I believe that smokers have every right to destroy their hearts, lungs and other organs by willingly ingesting poisons almost certain to hasten their death, preceded by prolonged suffering. As an almost-libertarian, I believe that government has no right to stop mentally competent adults from killing themselves, either by slow or fast means.

However, government does have an obligation to prevent suicidal individuals from destroying the health and the lives of innocent victims in addition to their own. That is why self-destructive individuals lacking in will power like Mr. Hart should not be allowed to poison bartenders, servers, co-workers, other customers, etc., with the deadly second-hand smoke from their cigarettes.

In other words, Mr. Hart, the reason no one is trying to stop restaurants from serving saturated fat-filled foods like hamburgers and bacon is that no one has ever died — or even been harmed — from “second-hand” bacon, burgers, pizza, etc. Only those eating such foods are being harmed. On the other hand, there is a mountain of incontrovertible evidence that the smoke exhaled by smokers is doing serious harm to others in the vicinity who have no choice but to inhale it. This fact was conveniently absent from Hart’s article. Just one of millions of non-smoking Americans who have died from second-hand smoke (as well as other causes in some cases) was Dana Reeve, the wife of the late Christopher Reeve who never smoked in her life but died recently at age 44 of lung cancer.

According to a massive study on the effects of second-hand smoke that was the subject of an article last month in the British Medical Journal, “Second-hand smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, including 69 known carcinogens such as formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, benzene and radioactive polonium 210. Passive smoking (the smoke breathed in by non-smokers close to a smoker) has been linked to lung cancer, heart disease, sudden infant death syndrome, bronchitis and asthma ... The chemical reactions that produce second-hand smoke mean that passive smokers may even breathe in more toxins than actual smokers.”

I myself have never smoked, but I have had chronic breathing problems requiring medication for many years and even had surgery at Chestnut Hill Hospital 25 years ago to free up breathing passageways. There is no doubt in my mind that these problems stem from the second-hand smoke I was forced to inhale while growing up, since my father was a three-pack-a-day smoker who eventually died of lung disease. Also the smoke from various offices where I worked long before most workplaces went smoke-free.

While working for the Philadelphia Journal from 1977 to 1981, I had smokers on either side of me in the newsroom. I remember asking the managing editor to separate smokers from non-smokers; he said that was impossible. I then politely asked the smokers next to me if they would refrain from smoking at work. The next day, when I came to work, I found that my desk had been trashed, with papers from the desktop and inside the drawers thrown all over the floor.

From 1986 to 1994 I was the editor of a weekly paper called the Mainliner News. (Today it is Main Line Life.) Every Monday was production day, when I would spend 16 to 18 hours putting out the paper at an office in Delaware County. There were 13 employees in one giant room, and nine of them were smokers. By the time I would leave at about 3 a.m., my eyes were burning, my nose was stuffy, my head was pounding, my heart was racing, and my clothes and hair smelled like a toxic waste dump. I begged the publisher, a smoker, to require smokers to go outside to smoke. He said, “No way.”

In December of 1980, we had several relatives visit us from Indiana, and we celebrated with a big pre-Christmas dinner at Tell Erhardt’s, the upscale restaurant in the Chestnut Hill Hotel which I could hardly afford. At the time very few restaurants in the city even had a non-smoking section (Tell Erhardt did not have one), much less an entire non-smoking dining room.

As we were just getting our entrees delivered, a man at the next table who was just finishing his entree whipped out a huge cigar, lit it up and blew the smoke in the direction of my mother-in-law, an emphysema patient who was connected by wires to a portable oxygen machine. I angrily told the idiot to put out the cigar, explaining that my mother-in-law was hooked up to an oxygen machine. The man refused, insisting that it was his “right” to smoke.

Things got nasty and loud; other diners stopped eating and stared in our direction, and a waiter rushed into the kitchen to inform Tell Erhardt of the angry confrontation. The German chef, who was a frequent guest on local TV shows at the time, rushed over to the cigar smoker, apologized profusely to him and offered to buy coffee, after-dinner drinks and dessert for him and his wife if they would leave their table and go to the bar. Erhardt, who has a restaurant today in upper Bucks County, said nothing to us. Back then — and for centuries — non-smokers who resisted being poisoned had no “rights.” Only the poisoners had them.

Therefore, to those contemporary smoking crybabies like Mr. Hart who complain that their “rights” are being abridged, I say, “Tough noogies.” Deal with it. If you don’t like being treated like a pariah, the solution is obvious: quit the smelly, filthy, expensive, obnoxious, anti-social habit, and then you won’t have to worry anymore about “discrimination.”

Unlike those who get cancer through no fault of their own, smokers — like those addicted to other drugs — deserve little sympathy since they willingly chose to engage in self-destructive behavior, knowing full well the consequences. If someone decides to slash his wrists, is it logical for him to then complain that he is actually bleeding to death?