by Patrick Sills

Created on: May 09, 2010

Smoking bans can be summed up with one word: Fascism. It's as simple as that. Truthfully, words can't even begin to describe how unfair and unjust such policies are. Put simply, smoking bans discriminate against one in five US adults. They violate the basic constitutional right to one's pusuit of happiness. They furthermore ignore the rights of free enterprise.

Of course, America's 60 million smokers have been given a reason for such a drastic change in attitude in the past couple of decades. Bans are said to be put into place to "protect" nonsmokers from "secondhand smoke," a term unheard of itself until the late 1980s or early 1990s, depending on how quickly one's local municipality jumped on the Nico-Nazi bandwagon. There is no proof whatsoever that  passive tobacco smoke has killed a single nonsmoker, let alone cause cancer or respiratory disease. This instead comes from wild guesses created by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control with the help of a computer program. In turn, the EPA picked a few "studies" concocted by biased antismoking groups (most notably, the big pharmaceutical companies that stood to reap huge profits from selling smoking-cessation drugs,) upon which to base this bogus conclusion. In fact the entire EPA Report on "secondhand smoke" was thrown out of court just five years after it was released to the public! This should have been the end of it, but instead, it was just the beginning of this nation's ongoing transformation from the Land of the Free to the Land of Governmental Intrusion into our personal lives.

In 1994, the Congressional Research Service determined that bartenders who work 40 hours a week in establishments that permit smoking woud "inhale" about 1.5 cigarettes in a MONTH. A 2005 American Cancer Society study found that bingo hall workers would have to be employed for about five YEARS before they would ingest the nicotine from just ONE cigarette. A glass of ordinary tap water contains about 500 times more arsenic than the smoke from one cigarette. It would require some 30,000 homes with smoking residents to fill a single 18-ounce aerosol can with pure tobacco smoke. One tankful of gas in a car will put more toxins into the air than what a smoker could produce in his or her lifetime. These are just a few reasons why smoking bans are ridiculous.

Smoking and nonsmoking sections in public places worked for decades.The cabin air on commercial flights was

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