by Miron Huhulea

Created on: March 26, 2009

I think the question itself is incredibly offensive. Rapists have rights. They have the right to an attorney, the right to a trial by a jury of their peers, the right to food, shelter, toilet and shower facilities if incarcerated, even the right to a "humane" death if this is their sentence - besides many other additional rights. Murderers have rights. In theory at least, every person has rights. So why not smokers?

Perhaps it's because smokers have come to be considered a nuisance to decent, freedom-loving folk everywhere, folks who don't want their rights to "fresh, clean air" impinged upon by a smoker's "dirty habit." In the eyes of society, the smoker has become not just a nuisance but a hazard, a dangerous sociopath who sacrifices the tenuous health of others - including children! - to fulfill his or her own need for immediate gratification.

It came down from the top - perhaps from the US Department of Health and Human Services - that smoking is unhealthy, and legislation was penned by some congressman or senator with the brilliant idea that, if a social stigma is placed on smoking (and by extension smokers), then people would tolerate and even support atobaccotax of four or five hundred percent (unthinkable for any other commodity!), and so the government could add an inextinguishable source of revenue to their coffers. A media campaign was started and the public ate it up.

So smoking was stigmatized, outlawed in any public building in many states, and, in just 40 years, went from cool and debonair habit to filthy, antisocial and dangerous criminal activity. Tobacco smoke, after all, contains nothing but toxins, of which carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide are but a few - even the nicotine (theingredientdesirable to smokers) is toxic. It's fair, therefore, that even the merest contact with tobacco smoke should be prohibited, and the people who light up considered criminals, right? But even criminals have rights.

Let's say for argument's sake that smoking is not as dangerous as public opinion currently holds it to be, that it's been used in parts of the world for thousands of years and in other parts at least for centuries, that less than half of lifelong smokers develop lung cancer themselves, not to mention the victims of their second-hand smoke that may have accidentally inhaled a breath or two while waiting for a table at their local Denny's - let's presuppose all this; and here is my real question: why smoking?

Why pick on smoking as the

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