Blowing smoke

Among this world's oppressed minorities are, according to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the unfortunate millions of Americans who use its products. Reynolds has been taking out large ads in this newspaper and others to argue that while the cause of freedom has been advancing in recent years in Russia, Eastern Europe and South Africa, the prospect here in the United States is less bright. Here in the land of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Jesse Helms, an overbearing government seeks to harass and persecute those individualists who, puff-puff, refuse to go along with the common herd.

It almost makes you want to rush out and take a smoker to lunch. Further, it almost (but not quite) makes you forget that smoking endangers the health not only of smokers but of anyone who breathes the smoke that people with cigarettes create.

Specifically, Reynolds complains that the government wants to put a prohibitive tax on cigarettes and, worse, may impose a "total smoking ban in private as well as public places in some circumstances". That's a reference to a rule about indoor air quality on which the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been holding hearings. It would, among other things, protect workers at their jobs from other people's smoke.

That, Reynolds protests, would set a dangerous precedent. What comes next? it asks, and then suggests a horrible slippery slope of prospects: A ban on alcohol and coffee ... and then federal restrictions on fatty food ... leading in turn (the corporation suggests -- we don't want you to think we are making this up) to restrictions on books, movies and music. The ad ends with the plaintive exhortation, "Together, we can work it out".

We -- meaning the public and its government -- are already working it out. That's what Reynolds is complaining about. The proper rule is pretty simple: One person ought not be allowed to subject others to involuntary health risks. Keep in mind the study published last June in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that, among women who had never smoked, the risk of lung cancer was 39 percent higher among those who had been exposed at their jobs to other people's smoke.

The freedom to blow smoke in other people's faces belongs in the same category as the freedom to drive drunk and the freedom to throw your garbage in the street. But in a free society Reynolds has a right to present its case, however feeble, and to evade the health issue, however powerful the medical evidence.

-- The Washington Post