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 cause of aging and disease, even of... cancer? What about the food we eat? When we go for that weekly meal at our local Denny's, do we really know what we're ingesting and assimilating into ourselves? If we order a piece of fried chicken, do we know what conditions that animal was raised in or what it ate? Because what IT ate becomes what WE eat. Did it eat a healthy diet or industrial feed? How was it slaughtered and then stored? How was it prepared? Are the restaurant's facilities clean? How old is the oil in which it was fried? How often is it changed? Was the chicken fried and then left to sit, only to be reheated in a microwave? How many toxins and carcinogenic compounds does that one piece of chicken contain? Just because a meal doesn't make you "sick" right away doesn't mean it's healthful, doesn't mean there aren't toxins building up in your body, same as in a smoker's, that could lead to colon cancer or diverticulitis down the line.
And what about obesity and its associated risks? Does the same person who condemns the smoker smoking in front of the restaurant for polluting her and her children's air then go inside and sow the seeds of heart disease and Type II diabetes? The seeds of arterial hypertension and dyslipidemia? The seeds which could grow into the flowers of heart attack, stroke and Peripheral Artery Disease, same as in a smoker? And if a mother teaches these unhealthy eating behaviors to her children, should she be considered a criminal and have her rights taken away? Is she not doing at least as much damage to the people around her as the smoker?
And if, tired of these arguments and of the risks associated with eating out (which may have become tedious to the reader), that family then leaves the restaurant for some fresh air, is there any certainty about the quality of that air? Perhaps it is loaded with industrial pollutants and pollutants from automobiles. Whatever's lurking in that air may be the secret to the 10 to 20 percent of cases of lung cancer in people who have never smoked, the ones where genetics and "environmental factors" are listed as the likely cause.
The fact is, our world is loaded with toxins. Another fact is that we are mortal and, sooner or later, we must die. If we stigmatize and demonize the smoker, are we really creating a safer or a "healthier" world for ourselves? Do we even have the sophistication to understand what health means or what will eventually kill us? Is it perhaps incomprehensible to think that the plastic bags we use and tampon applicators we throw away will one day come back as toxins in the fish we eat? Or is it easier to scapegoat the smoker, and suggest that these people should not have any rights?