Let’s be honest and stop pretending that smokefree laws discriminate against so called smokers.  Here’s what advocates of smokefree laws are saying. You do not have the right to pollute the air of the people around you. You do not have the right to endanger the lives of others, nor do you have the right to compromise their health!

Here is the most often used phrase by defenders of public smoking. “If you don’t like the smoke don’t go there!” Tobacco defenders are very transparent in their advocacy of discrimination of people who do not breathe smoke into their lungs! They very clearly represent their intent to exclude a very well defined class called human beings. It is no different than saying no Blacks, no Jews, no Gays, no Hispanics, no Asians.

First of all, let’s be clear that the word “smoker” defines an action, not a class of people. Smokefree laws prohibit the act of smoking in places where the act would jeopardize the rights of others. Smokefree laws in no way prevent any human being from going to any public places. They prevent lighted cigarettes and other smoking devices from being used in public places.

So let’s stop the BS once and for all. There is no such thing as Smokers’ rights, because there is no such thing as a “smoker.” When a smoker is not smoking, he or she is simply another human being. Smokefree laws are directed at protecting the rights of all human beings.

Without smokefree laws, a small minority of nicotine addicts are simply allowed to continue to discriminate against everyone else by saying, “if you don’t want to breathe smoke into your lungs, then don’t go out in public.” In order to perpetuate this ludicrous hypothesis for the past century, we have all been asked to pretend that smoke is not smoke. We have been asked to believe that smoke does not drift, that it respects imaginary boundaries, that it does not seep through the cracks in floors and ceilings, that it does not cause harm when it enters the lungs of someone outdoors.

The smokefree movement is a civil rights movement like all of the other civil rights movements that came before. It is an evolutionary process that requires the entire population of the world to eventually admit our complicity in a belief system that allows more preventable deaths than any other action in the world.

In order to stop the tobacco genocide, we must first admit that sucking smoke into human lungs is not only deadly, it is absolutely ludicrous. We must deconstruct a belief system that pretends compassion for nicotine addicts, but in reality demonizes those who are victims of secondhand smoke. We must deconstruct a paradigm that legitimizes an act that literally kills its participants and many bystanders. But our biggest task is to educate those who are still unaware that they have the right to a better life. Whether we smoke or not, the entire world are slaves to tobacco. In order to destroy the tobacco paradigm, we must first convince the world that slavery is wrong, that we all have a right to be free. When that finally happens, then perhaps reason will replace illogic in the conversation about tobacco abuse. There are two points that, in a rational world, would be self evident. Everyone has the right to breathe clean unpolluted air! No one has the right to sell a product that kills its users!