Do American citizens who smoke have civil rights?
And the answer increasingly appears to be: No. In the course of the last decade–and often under the rubric of “Nonsmokers’ Rights”–smokers, as a class, have been banished from public life and systematically deprived of a series of basic rights (as enumerated here). The result is that first-class American citizens, who used to be considered as equal before the law, are no longer even entitled to be “separate but equal,” they’re simply not entitled–to anything at all. In a putative democracy, our government, in print, is now boasting that Americans who smoke are “second class,” in fact “second-class citizens.”3 In fact, this boast is true. On a practical level, there is simply no reason for the ban on American smokers. The “Public Health” argument, deployed by the EPA, is unconscionably flawed4 and distressingly familiar. Public Health as a rationale for legislation and segregation has a long and dishonorable record. Till the end of the 1950’s, the identical kinds of arguments–the “m
