As I stood puffing on a cigarette one damp February morning, a stranger approached me and remarked, "y'know, those things will kill ya." I was shocked, not at the potential health risks of smoking (which have decorated American cigarette packs since 1966) but at my supposed ignorance. Of course, smoking kills you, so do guns, crack, and AIDS. Well let me go in peace, I am well aware of the risk body and I choose to smoke anyway.
Over the course of my short life, I have witnessed drastic restrictions in one's freedom to smoke. When I was eight, growing up in California, smoking was banned from the vast majority of workplaces and restaurants in the entire state, a reasonable measure to protect non-smokers from diseases like emphysema and chronic bronchitis. And, by the time I was twelve, smoking was banned from bars. Now, nine years later, it has become quite difficult for me to smoke in my native state.
I worked with a graduate student in San Jose who was arrested for public intoxication because he smoked outside of a bar on his twenty-first birthday, since he was not allowed to smoke inside. Unfortunately, it's not just the cops who harass smokers.
Anyone who does not smoke will harass (or secretly want to harass) me about my habit. And so much for the lobbying of Big Tobacco, it seems that the government hates smoking more than anyone. Or perhaps they love the revenue they get by claiming that tobacco taxes discourage smoking. According to the CDC, the national average of state taxes per pack was ninety-two cents in 2004. That equates to about twenty-four percent of the average cost of a pack in the same year.
Life is tough for today's smoker, as evident by the perpetual shrinking of smoking sections in airports, sporting arenas, and restaurants. People use to pass out cigars in maternity wards, now I can't even smoke an Ultra Light while stuffing singles into a stripper's g-string.
There are other, less obvious, deterrents to smoking than widespread bans. For example, there is a lack of convenient ashtrays, on this campus especially. I count eight, at the Physical Plant, Brawley, Merrill, Robert, Brazeal, King, the Leadership Center, and the bookstore. The presence of only one ashtray for about every five buildings on campus makes proper disposal of cigarette butts inconvenient if not unlikely.
If you need proof of this smoker's burden, look down at the cigarette butts slowly piling around you, along with the chicken bones and club fliers they make up about ninety-five percent of the garbage on this campus. I already lose about fifteen minutes of my life expectancy for every cigarette; it is not it fair that I should waste an additional five minutes looking for an ashtray.
