US TV-news show ‘“60 Minutes” once broadcast an interview with an American who defected to North Korea. He had finally gotten homesick and returned, after an absence of several decades. When asked what the biggest change was: “You can’t smoke anywhere,” he replied.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Vapers-GuardianUK-350x210.jpg) Young chaps vaping their fubar lives away.
The last country I was in which allowed smoking inside was Bosnia. Or maybe it was Herzegovina? Look at a political map - that place was more screwed up by “humanitarian intervention” than… well, not so bad as some places like Libya and Afghanistan, but their frontiers are screwed up pretty bad. Sarajevo is a mid-level American town (not a city), only with bullet holes in every building (still!). It’s different from Newark because there is no museum where you can remember the 4-year siege - although maybe the local Newarkian gangs run similar tours for their members, that I don’t know.
Smoking in a bar for the first time in many years was really… different. That smoke went nowhere - a lack of funds for bullet hole repairs rather implies a lack of funds for high-tech ventilation systems - and non-smokers just had to suck it up and quit crying about it or go home. It wasn’t a picnic with all that smoke - it was a bar. You know, where people kill themselves slowly with another drug - alcohol.
Therefore, no children were there, and people smoking in the bar were not as bad as Hitler - they were merely similar to the adult savages from that nasty, brutish, short era known as “the 1980s everywhere around the world”. Universal public smoking was so recent that all the low-cost airlines I fly still have ashtrays in the armrests.
People still love to smoke, yet they have no rights anymore. Only socialist North Korea seems to allow smoking, at least that’s the way I imagine North Korea. Not sure if I can get a visa there, but I can’t afford to vacation, anyway. It’s not that smokes are so expensive - I don’t smoke so much (a little thing called discipline/nicotine addiction is not engraved in my DNA). I am just a typical smoker in the Age of Austerity - mostly broke, occasionally dreaming of Pyongyang.
Fortunately I have - as I paranthesed - discipline, so I don’t really care about smoking in bars or public places, but why is it that certain identity groups get rights but the identity group of “smokers don’t”? Something like 20% of the world smokes, yet only Pyongyang is tolerant anymore? Did socialism get tolerance right? I mean, other than the “we are all comrades, unless you are a parasitic aristocrat” part?
Socialism also got the secondhand smoking science right, rather crucially. Per this in-depth article on Slate titled, “We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans”:
“The 2006 Surgeon General’s Report, the most definitive treatment of the topic, estimates the lung cancer risk of chronically exposed nonsmokers at just 1.12–1.43 times that of people without frequent exposure. (By comparison, smokers themselves take on a risk more than 12 times higher than that of nonsmokers.)
Now that’s not nothing, but other recent research may be even more surprising. “No clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer,” read a 2013 headline in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, hardly a pro-tobacco publication. That was a report on a cohort study tracking 76,000 women that failed to detect a link between the disease and secondhand smoke. The finding comports with existing literature suggesting that the effect is borderline and concentrated on long-term, high levels of exposure.
You mean secondhand-smoking at a bar in Bosnia once won’t kill a person? More on scientific reality later, but firstly:
Why are there no minority rights for smokers, but there are for ___(insert here your preferred stupid identity group/tribe/religion/party/region/city/block in that city/side of the street in that block)?
Well, I’m hip - I’m not standing up for anyone deemed to be unpopular in the Mainstream Media. That’s a sure way to get knocked down/fired/consigned to eternal internet infamy in the 21st century.
However, 50+ people have died and 2,400 people have been seriously hurt from vaping already.
Already. If 50 people have died after far less than a decade of vaping - it is truly THAT toxic, apparently - a simple mathematical regression analysis performed by someone who performs those things would surely find that tens of thousands of people are about to drop dead, right?
Math is cruel. Vaping, apparently, is so bad for you that it is worse than smoking. About those things I can do no such anything other than advise you to get a will and/or testament ready if you vape.
We may ban vaping, but we will not ban smoking… ever. The political (social) reality is: people gonna smoke - that’s why they vaped in the first place: You wouldn’t let them smoke.
I think many non-smokers don’t realise that reality: smokers want to smoke in public - they itchingly, burningly NEED to smoke in public - but you only let them vape!
Politically, that’s a regression equation I can do: we must re-legalize smoking worldwide to avoid the looming vape death crisis.
Surely, smokers’ rights must immediately come to the fore.
Even though most of us don’t smoke (I don’t REALLY smoke, so shut your attacks of “Oportunista!”), to oppose supporting smokers’ rights at at time when so many are about to die just because they vaped - in order to finally be allowed to smoke something in public - is to make you, sir or madam, worse than Hitler or his enabler Eva Braun.
Here’s where the column gets serious
I repeat: smokers gonna smoke, and they only vape because they aren’t allowed to smoke.
Perhaps just as badly, they are not allowed to move to North Korea, due to Western sanctions.
(At least I imagine that’s true. Certainly: be an American who moves to North Korea and no one in your nuclear family will ever again get a loan/good credit rating/refinance that 2nd mortgage in the era of Quantitative Easing in order to not work so much overtime in 2020).
So there you are - broke, refinancing, working overtime, not even vacationing in North Korea and vaping in the nation of capitalism-imperialism, and you can’t smoke indoors nowheres, to boot. You are part of a huge minority - like various sexual/religious/gender/ethnic groups - yet you have no rights - why?
As always, the main answer is class: Smokers in the US are usually from the lower class, and the lower class have no real recourse to political rights in the American, money-driven system.
Even worse, to be pro-smokers’ rights is to be pro-lower class, and I have never seen a leftist rally for them in America. I have never seen anything at all pro-lower class in America. I have met some immigrants who talked about being pro-lower class, but very few Americans with this point of view.
Being against smokers’ rights only makes sense from a class analysis if you are talking about workers, like waitresses, who have to endure smoking in public places. Well, this “I vaped and now I have a lung illness syndrome “ is about to be a deadly epidemic, so why are waitresses’ rights more important in the short term, especially given the fact that second-hand smoke is not anywhere as deadly as claimed? An obvious compromise can be made: force modern ventilation systems into smoking bars and restaurants.
Can’t afford those because Clintonian neoliberalism has reduced the average American town to near-Bosnian levels? Sure, I have eyes - I get that. But politics is compromise - create SOME smokers’ rights areas in the US because there are currently none!
Again, quite seriously: we must end the war on smokers in order to prevent a vaping epidemic, thus we must allow smokers to smoke in bars, coffee shops, restaurants…. somewhere! Maybe California can lead a referendum on exactly where, but without granting smokers some rights again, many more will die from vaping and that is a fact.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/albert-camus-smoking-cigarette-ban-france-350x238.jpg) Camus with his inevitable dangling cigarette. He was an intellectual, n'est ce pas? Intellectuals need to show their contempt for death.
I side with the waitresses, because I am deeply attached to anyone who brings me hot food I don’t have to cook, but I’m sure they will gladly tolerate smoking if it means no mass deaths. The true enemy here are not lower class waitresses, but the upper middle and upper classes.
The real “let them smoke vape” rather than allow public smoking is from Helicopter Moms - and, let’s face it in 20th century America, Helicopter Dads, who no longer can use going hunting or fishing as an excuse to get away from Helicoptering - who will freak out at the idea that their future Mozart/Henry Kissinger is breathing oxygen which is not perfectly pure at their private Montessori school.
Teachers smoked in my public classroom when I was young. Can teachers even smoke in the Teachers’ Lounge anymore?
I never thought I’d be pushing the rights of teachers, but such is the seriousness of this vape death crisis.
But must vapers die not to inconvenience little Junior and those with the money to be self-righteous? Hardly - that’s American democracy, which prides itself on minority rights… right?
Wrong - rights are for those in the upper classes in American democracy and they don’t smoke.
Why did smokers apparently absent themselves from the political process and lose their rights? They were probably going hunting and fishing, because most lower class people smoke and hunt and fish. But now they have to vape and are merely two enormous thunderclouds of vape smoke hits from death, apparently.
Vaping deaths will continue, all because you couldn’t stand a little smoke from nervous people who are addicted to nicotine. Thus, we must immediately drastically expand smokers’ rights again, you anti-smoking Adolf!
They say that when you compare someone to Hitler you immediately lose the argument, but that’s not hyperbole - both of you based your nefarious agendas on faulty science.
Isn’t the non-death of many vapers worth a bit of smoke in SOME public areas? We allow people to drink alcohol, and surely that is more costly to the local and federal taxpayer?
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/LinoVentura-drag.jpg) Arrêter de fumer? PAS MOI, MONSIEUR!
Our politicians must respond in the affirmative: yes, from every important standpoint - moral, economic, class - restoring smokers’ rights is an immediate imperative. Every dead vaper is a stain on libertarianism and leftism, and a victory against Helicopter Parenting, which is certainly the sociopolitical scourge of America’s future.
Bosnians and/or Herzogovinians can stand it, and haven’t they stood for worse? They know what’s what: I’ve never been sieged - except by angry ex-girlfriends - but it sounds much worse than merely having your clothes smell of smoke after a night out at the bar where you were doing all kinds of other bad stuff for your body anyway.
But I insist: Back “smoking in public” campaigns now or prove yourself to be a reactionary elitist who actually benefits from Quantitative Easing loans and who couldn’t care less about the vape deaths which are sure to continue.
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