Civil disobedience in Martinsville
My wife came across a news item in the Bloomington Herald Times a week or so ago about a diner in Martinsville that was resisting that town’s no-smoking ordinance. Bloomington and Monroe County successively rammed through ordinances essentially banning all indoor smoking in anything but private homes last year and apparently Martinsville followed suit not long thereafter. The owners of the diner were refusing to comply and asking patrons to donate to a legal fund to fight the ordinance.
I’m not a smoker – I’m not a nicotine addict and I’ve never smoked cigarettes. I took up occasional cigar smoking around 10 years ago in part for political reasons and in part because smoking a cigar once or twice a month is enjoyable. The political reasons stem from my long-standing fight against all sorts of prohibitions of private, consensual behavior. I figured that it would be good to have something to lose, as it were, in the push to ban nicotine, hence the cigars. And make no mistake: the U.S. is in the final phase of a drive that will end with full nicotine/smoking prohibition. As for the liking it part, it turns out that I get a real rush from smoking a cigar. Nicotine is a central nervous system (CNS) stimulant – a performance enhancer – as are such drugs as caffeine and cocaine (among many others) and the rush is quite real. The correct way to enjoy any given drug is to use it infrequently. This maximizes the psychoactive effect. The more frequently you use a psychoactive drug the more your system adjusts to it. You have to use more to get the same effect. That’s the trap a user – particularly a cigarette smoker – can fall into.
From the standpoint of prohibition, banning cigarette smoking comes closest to making sense. As I noted in Crime and the Drug War: The Politics of Hysteria, cigarettes are both more addictive than cocaine and more than an order of magnitude more lethal. Nonetheless, prohibition is still predicated on the assumption that the government owns your body and that you don’t and, as such, it is a pernicious doctrine.
Smoking bans have enlisted popular support by convincing people that second-hand smoke is deadly. Even if this were true – it’s not – there is no reason that smoking couldn’t be regulated in a manner that would allow businesses to choose whether or not to cater to a smoking clientele. For example, just treat the chemical byproducts of burning tobacco the same way you’d treat smoke from a grill or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) from burning candles. When I suggested this at a public meeting of some Bloomington commission back in 1993, it fell on deaf ears. The anti-smoking zealots revealed what I already knew: they were not interested in a rational approach that would balance the rights of smokers and non-smokers. They wanted prohibition and public bans were the necessary first step.
I’ve been warning smokers for years that their time was coming. If smoking is more dangerous than using cocaine (it is) then sooner or later it will be banned. I naively assumed that I could enlist smokers as allies in the fight against drug prohibition. Very few saw the connection. I once spoke with some PR person at one of the big tobacco companies about the consequences of denying that tobacco/nicotine was a drug – the response was decidedly unfriendly. Guess what: the monster has eaten everyone else and you’re now the dessert.
After alerting me to the diner in Martinsville, my wife suggested that we could go there and show solidarity and I could smoke a cigar at the same time. That sounded viable – I hadn’t smoked a cigar since sometime late last year (probably December) just before the Bloomington ban took effect. She called them up and got directions - we planned to go on Saturday. In preparation, Friday after work, I stopped off at the Briar and Burley in downtown Bloomington and bought a Fuente Fuente Opus X - truly an exquisite cigar. Of the various cigars I’ve smoked over the years, I’d rate it one of the best.
The diner, called “Charlie’s”, closes at 6 pm local (2300 GMT), so we needed to get an early start. It’s really more of a breakfast and lunch place than a place to have dinner and, it turns out that Charlie’s is an old drive-in. (Brought back memories of the ‘50’s.) Dinner fare is mostly burgers – the specialite de maison is the giant tenderloin. My wife ordered the former, I had the latter. There was a tipjar for the legal defense fund – I dropped a twenty in. Naturally, I began engaging folks in political conversation. One of the owners asked if we were the people who called from Bloomington. Yes, indeed. She said that she had never smoked, nor does anyone in her family. This was strictly a matter of principle. Yes, I said – also property rights. It’s your business and you should be able to do with it what you wanted. The nannies wanted to tell everyone how to run their lives. My wife pointed out that there are folks who, if they could, would prohibit the sale of breaded tenderloins.
After the meal, as I smoked on my cigar, another of the owners came over to our table and introduced himself. He filled us in a little bit on the ordinance. Like the other owner, he is a non-smoker. I said I didn’t think he’d prevail in court but that I thought he was doing the right thing in fighting the ordinance. A friend of his came over. He said that a lot of people had fought and died so that people could enjoy freedom – he wasn’t a smoker either but he was a strong supporter and was going to make out a check for the legal defense fund. He then told us about the new Veteran’s Memorial downtown that he helped to get built. He invited us to go see it. It recognized local veterans from WW I to the current global war on terror (GWOT), including a fellow killed in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. We promised that we would. (We did.)
In the course of the political discussions at Charlie’s I mentioned, but did not press, the point that after you fail in the courts, the only recourse was to disobey the law. There are more than enough tobacco/nicotine users and friends to stop and roll back this prohibition. All it takes is enough people refusing to obey. If they fine you, refuse to pay. Go into public buildings and smoke and refuse to leave. Make them arrest you. Clog the courts. The prohibition movement will grind to a halt. All it takes is will.
Alas, there is no will, only docile resignation. It really does seem that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”