Smoking Is Not A Valid Civil Right Pro Smoke Ban Quit Kidding Around; Tobacco Smoke’s A Deadly Health Threat.

During the past 25 years, the United States dramatically has cleaned up its outdoor air, using regulations that ban pollution less noxious than what we still tolerate in the reeking blue air of a restaurant’s cocktail lounge.

All of us have benefited from cleaner outdoor air. It is past time to address our indoor air. It is time to quit kidding around about tobacco smoke. That is, by far, the deadliest single threat to public health.

Yet, efforts to combat it still are being stymied by a ridiculous debate about smokers’ “rights” and by an equally ridiculous belief - the creation of tobacco industry advertising - that smoking is a sign of social sophistication.

Smoking is not a valid civil right. Nor, with it causing more than 400,000 deaths a year, is smoking an innocuous “choice.” It is a killer, bigger than war, bigger than narcotics, that public policy should combat. And where is the social sophistication in ashtray breath or in the wheeze of emphysema or in a young mother dying from lung cancer - a tragic bequest from her pipe-smoking intellectual dad?

Valid civil rights begin with the right to life. The liberty to smoke loses its right to protection when it kills and sickens non-smokers.

Non-smokers most likely to be victimized are smokers’ spouses and children; only private restraint - not public regulation - can deal with smoke in the home. But restaurants are workplaces and public places. When smoking is tolerated in workplaces, it assaults all employees. When it’s allowed in public places, it assaults nonsmoking adults and their children. Asthma, which afflicts about one in 10 children, often includes sensitivity to smoke.

Restaurants are one of the last bastions of indoor smoking. Few restaurants adequately ventilate their smoking areas. Chronic exposure to the fumes threatens the health of employees. Countless customers suffer asthma attacks as a result of the tobacco smoke that proprietors allow to filter throughout their premises.

Smokers should remain free to puff away in designated outdoor areas. But indoors, public health and workplace authorities have all the reason they need to make tobacco pollution a thing of the past.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Ban would hack away at freedoms

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = EDITORIAL, COLUMN - From both sides CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board