By Dennis Scheil
I’ve never been a smoker. The siren song of the rebellious cancer stick never sang in my ear when I was a teenager, and it failed to snag me as I grew older. That’s a good thing, because I have enough addictions (power tools, electronic gadgetry, really good beer) that our family budget probably couldn’t stand the strain of yet another.
But we have friends who smoke, so the screen porch just off our living room has become the “smokers’ porch” and our good friend Susan (who isn’t a smoker either) gave us a spiffy infrared heater to keep the smokers warm when December winds blow cold. We don’t treat them as lepers out on the screen porch or the deck either, but will often go outside to join the smokers who are taming their nicotine beasts. Unless it’s too cold of course!
Yes, my occasional exposure to secondhand smoke will probably take several seconds off my life expectancy, but the way I see it, incessant worrying about evil tobacco will drive me to an early grave far faster than a random whiff of a Marlboro. Stress will kill you quite a bit faster than smoke, and our friends are people with a habit, not secondhand-smoking-child-murdering monsters, so we treat them with the respect they deserve.
That brings me to the recent anti-smoking ordinance that was passed by Board of Health. Banning smoking in public buildings and in workplaces was a necessary step due to the fact that most building HVAC systems do not adequately filter out smoke from the air, and I am old enough to remember offices filled with a dense gray fog to appreciate ones where the air might be stale and nasty, but at least it is free of smoke.
So moving smokers outside where Aeolus’ breezes can dissipate the smoke coming off the lit end of the cigarette, while allowing them to inhale the nicotine stew from the filter end makes perfect sense. But now we’re telling our smoking brethren, “No more parks for you!” Right. No more sunshine, no more birds chirping, no more soft spring breezes. Seriously, we treat heroin addicts with more respect than smokers.
Anyone who believes that this ordinance will in any way affect how many teenagers take up smoking is delusional. Remember, teenagers aren’t allowed to purchase cigarettes anyway, so they’re already sneaking around to be able to smoke. The new ordinance will simply make them sneak a little harder, and will add to that delicious feeling of being an outlaw while puffing away behind the Shopping Center.
Folks, every man, woman and child above the age of 4 in the USA knows that cigarettes are bad for you, including those teenagers who snuck into the old hospital parking garage so they could smoke above an alleged abandoned septic tank.
Our police force has more important things to do than to enforce this ordinance. And my skin crawls when I think of the kind of self-righteous Princetonian who would confront folks minding their own business and (heaven forbid!) smoking in a Princeton park. Though I might be more amused if said outlaws were, say, a biker gang having their spring picnic – THAT would be worth watching.
We’ve turned into a town of Puritans. We have self-righteous Puritan Prius owners who conveniently forget the environmental havoc that those toxic batteries will eventually cause. We have self-righteous Puritan school PTO members who extol the value of fresh natural foods in a newsletter and then two pages later announce a canned food drive for the poor.
We have Puritan citizens groups that pretend to care about the Witherspoon Street neighborhood while making subtly (and not-so-subtly) racist comments about who might or might not feel comfortable walking through a proposed redevelopment of the hospital site.
We really need to stop. Vilification of smokers has no real purpose except to make the vilificators (yeah I know, that’s not a word) feel good about themselves. It does nothing to really improve the town, the citizens of our town, or the world.
You really want to stop smoking? Work to pass a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale and consumption of tobacco products. We could call it “Prohibition.”
Dennis Scheil is a resident of Princeton, a graduate of Princeton High and has a master’s from Princeton University.
