Anti-Smoking Rules in Belmont

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/14/BAGP7OKTN41.DTL&hw=smoking+restrictions&sn=001&sc=1000

Belmont is considering the strict rules against smoking that would include a proposal to ban lighting up in multi-unit apartments and taxicabs and within 20 feet of any public building. Belmont is the first to consider prohibiting smoking in multi-unit residential buildings.

Is this not a classic example of liberty being violated? Don't I have the right to smoke in public or in my home? The issues goes to the heart of our debates about what liberty is and how far it extends. There are other ways of course in which we don't want the state to intrude into our homes, for example, in prohibiting certain types of sexual activity. Privacy is a bar to certain types of intrusions. But isn't cigarettes different? Smoking causes harm to other people in the multi-unit dwellings. Is smoking cigarettes like sex then? How sex is conducted in the bedroom does not cause harm to others. Well, at least physical harm. Some people might argue that sodomy causes social harm. I wouldn't make that argument but the fact that some people might shows that the very issue of harm is partly in the eyes of the beholder which is the problem. But cigarette smoking causes physical harm, which is different than just "harm in the eyes of the beholder." In this sense, smoking does violate the right of others to "life, liberty, and property." It certainly impacts "life." And some writers, like John Locke, wrote that we had a right to "life, liberty, health and property." Smoking in the vicinity of others harms others health. So it is arguable that smoking is different than sex which happens in the privacy of the bedroom. One does "actual physical harm" the other does harm only in the eyes of the beholder.

But smokers should have options to risk their lives. People risk lives every day to jump with bungy cords or from planes with parachutes. Risk is somethign that people should be free to pursue as long as the consequences are not harmful to others physically. Whether one can take risks that are harmful financially to others (like we have to organize a search party to find a person lost hiking in the wilderness, is another question to come back to).

So if Belmont tightens up the rule to protect health, that seems defensible. But they should open up places where people who want to smoke can smoke. How we deal with the financial burdens of cancer is another question that should be debated as well.