So what is the motivation for a city wide smoking ban? Is it to protect non-smokers from the dangerous second hand smoke? Perhaps it is an indirect way of discouraging people from starting to smoke in the first place, in order to save them from themselves.
In regards to the former question, much talk seems to be about the 'right' of the non-smoker to breath clean air vs. the 'right' of the smoker to smoke at their own disgretion. I believe that outlawing smoking in public is going overboard. As overpopulated as our planet is becoming, there seems to be ample space left for smokers to indulge without violating a non-smoker's personal space. I would hope that people can come to verbal agreements about when and where the smoking takes place without resorting to laws or fisticuffs, but unfortunately this does not always seem to be the case.
If a law must be made, it should have to do with distance one must be from an entrance to a building. But these rules tend to be meaningless. Each of the two schools I have attended had this rule, but the smokers do not pay any attention to it, and no one is going around enforcing it. It results in walking through a literal cloud of smoke when I want to walk in or out of the building where my classes are. This is particularly annoying to people who have asthma, but have no other way of getting to class.
As far as enforcement goes, i'm sure that a good amount of the policemen in Belmont, CA are smokers themselves. Will they simply disregard the law and allow people to smoke wherever they want to? Will they continue to smoke in their cars themselves? How could one reasonably expect a smoking police officer to hand out fines to people for smoking? (Not that policemen are never hypocrits, but I digress.)
Outlawing smoking in your own car also seems extreme, but there are a few obvious problems with smoking in the car that don't have to do with the health of the smoker or the disgust of the non-smokers driving by. Phrazz's point about starting fires by throwing lit cigarettes out the window is a good one. If it was legal to smoke in your car, but illegal to throw the cigarette butt out of the window, it would seem impossible to ever catch someone in the act (unless they were stupid enough to do it with a cop on their tail). It would be much easier to catch someone smoking in their car and punish them because there is a good chance that they would have thrown the butt out of the window when they were done, but this is like punishing someone for driving 50 mph 100 yards before a school zone assuming that they were not going to slow down. (Minority Report comes to mind.)
I'm sure that an unfortunate number of parents smoke in their car (and house) while their kids are there. Kids are particularly susceptable to second-hand smoke because they don't have the linguistic ability or power to tell/ask their parent not to smoke. Growing up in a cloud of second hand smoke is something that is probably an unfortunate innevitability for lots of children, but outlawing smoking in the car would at least give those kids 10 minutes of fresh air on the way to the grocery store.
In regards to the latter question, does a governing body have a 'right' to enforce laws that forbid people from harming themselves? One could take a paternalistic view on this and argue that smokers, in the long run, will regret having started smoking. If this is the case, does the government have a right (duty??) to stop people from starting to smoke in the first place, such as a parent might see themself as having a duty to prevent their child from smoking, even though little Jimmy thinks it is the coolest.
Another question arises from this...could outlawing a product such as tobacco actually be a productive way of increasing the health of society? Or will people still find a way to smoke, as they found a way to consume alcohol during prohibition, or as people continually find ways to use other illicit substances such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc.
The positive effects of outlawing such substances are arguable, but what could possibly be a reasonable punishment to give someone for harming themselves? The punishment often seems to outweigh the harm of the substance itself (especially in the case of weed and other not-so-mild hallucinogens). Could a legalist approach be used to justify such punishments? If the overly harsh punishments deter people from using these substances, do the ends justify the means? It seems that anti-drug activists often seem to justify their blatantly false propoganda with the idea that it will make less people use these substances which they have deemed to be dangerous. In the end, they are convinced that they have done good for society, even though they have never tried these substances and really don't know jack shit about them....but now i'm getting off subject.
[Drugs seem to be illegal because of the possible risk posed (to one's self or another) if they are not taken responsibly. But using this logic, shouldn't mountain climbing be illegal? A careless mountain climber could kill himself and his partner by being irresponsible. When people die from mountain climbing, no one blames the mountain, and neither should the drugs be blamed because of irresponsible use.]
From an ethical standpoint, is it ethical to smoke cigarettes? It has been documented that smoking cigarettes is obviously bad for one's health.
Cigarette smoking is the single most preventable cause of premature death in the United States. Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking. In fact, one in every five deaths in the United States is smoking related. Every year, smoking kills more than 276,000 men and 142,000 women.
(
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/research_dat ... ortali.htm)
But what is wrong with doing something that will eventually lead to a slow and painful death? In order "to have a right one must have the ability or desire that to which one has a right." (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics) The smoker desires to be allowed to smoke. The non-smoker desires to breath clean air. Any talk about rights is therefore meaningless in this context. If the smoker desires to smoke, regardless of the fact that he/she knows it will be harmful to their health, there is no reason to stop them besides smoking too close to someone who desires to breathe clean air, but this is obviously a problem that can be easily solved using civil communication.
Another ethical issue that comes to mind has to do with health care costs. Our country is severly lacking a competent health care system, but that's beside the point. Of the 400,000 Americans who die every year from tobacco related illnesses, a vast majority of them must spend their last weeks/months/years in the hospital. There is no doubt that this greatly and unneccessarily increases health insurance costs, which are (not coincidentally) constantly on the rise. In our current system, many people who need health insurance can't afford to have it. Those who can afford it would be able to pay for the medical treatment without health insurance anyways, so needless to say, it's a pretty fucked up system that needs radical reform.
To blame smokers for the awful system would be to scapegoat them, as they obviously aren't the only ones responsible for the problems with our health care system.
And to blame someone on his deathbed for increasing your health insurance costs by a few cents seems pretty damn cold-hearted, but if people stopped smoking it sure would help out a bunch.
Until then, I'll drink another to you as I light my cigarette.
