Put that in your pipe!

Excerpts from Reason’s Put that in your pipe.

Smoking has been around for hundreds of years, and it won’t go away, regardless of legislation. The Los Angeles Times recently observed: “Russia once whipped smokers, Turkey beheaded them and India slit their noses. The Massachusetts colony outlawed public smoking in the 1630s, and Connecticut required smokers to have permits in the 1940s. At various times between 1893 and 1921, cigarette sales were banned in North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Iowa, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, Utah, Kansas and Minnesota.” Despite such efforts, about a billion people around the world continue to smoke.

As Klein, the Cornell professor, notes, there is a direct link between freedom and the right to smoke. He writes: “Like other tyrants such as Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler, James I despised smoking and demonized tobacco. The relation between tyranny and the repression of the right to grow, sell, use, or smoke tobacco can be seen most clearly in the way movements of liberation, revolutions both political and cultural, have always placed those rights at the center of their political demands. The history of the struggle against tyrants has been frequently inseparable from that of the struggle on behalf of the freedom to smoke.”