Smokescreen - Lifted

Back in August, after Ames when Mike Huckabee was just starting to get any attention at all, he stated at a cancer forum that he would support a ban on smoking in the workplace nationwide, just as he had fought for it in Arkansas. The National Review Online crowd went wild, declaring him a "nanny stater" and thus began NRO's war on Mike Huckabee.

Here's the irony: just as Huckabee has revised his position, saying that these types of smoking bans are best handled at the state and local level, not federal, the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, has published his mea culpa in the matter of defending this deadly practice in the name of personal freedom:

My own story is that I am the founder of a doughty magazine which, if space was solicited tomorrow by a tobacco company, would agree to sell the space. We would come up with serious arguments featuring personal independence and pain/pleasure correlations to justify selling the space, but I would need to weep just a little bit on the inside over the simple existence of tobacco.

Again, the personal story. My wife began smoking (furtively) when 15, which is about when I also began. When we were both 27, on the morning after a high-pitched night on the town for New Year’s Eve, we resolved on mortification of the flesh to make up for our excesses: We both gave up smoking. The next morning, we decided to divorce — nothing less than that would distract us from the pain we were suffering. We came to, and flipped a coin — the winner could resume smoking. I lost, and for deluded years thought myself the real loser, deprived of cigarettes. Half a year ago my wife died, technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in
part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking. I stayed off the cigarettes but went to the idiocy of cigars inhaled, and suffer now from emphysema, which seems determined to outpace heart disease as a human killer.

Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You’d get a solemn and contrite, Yes. Solemn because I would be violating my secular commitment to the free marketplace. Contrite, because my relative indifference to tobacco poison for so many years puts me in something of the position of the Zyklon B defendants after World War II. These folk manufactured the special gas used in the death camps to genocidal ends. They pleaded, of course, that as far as they were concerned, they were simply technicians, putting together chemicals needed in wartime for fumigation. Some got away with that defense; others, not.

Those who fail to protest the free passage of tobacco smoke in the air come close to the Zyklon defendants in pleading ignorance.

In some ways I am surprised NR allowed this to be published at all, but I suppose they can't deny the wishes of their founder to do public penance on this matter. Though I certainly do not support criminalizing tobacco on the grounds of saving people from themselves, smoking in public certainly meets the legal definition of a "nuisance": a personal activity that imposes unacceptible risks and costs on others in the vacinity. The law has forbidden or punished nuisances even from the days when the state was truly only a "night watchman." Knowing what we know in 2008, there is no excuse on the grounds of "personal liberty" for allowing persons to impose this deadly nuisance on the lungs of others. Whether this is best handled state-by-state or nationally is a matter of pragmatic political judgment, but the policy considerations are the same.