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Health & Fitness

Smokers Find Themselves Increasingly Isolated by Laws and Regulations, a Welcome Development

Smoking Bans Proliferate, Including Outdoors: Hallelujah!

The Wall Street Journal featured an encouraging article in its Dec. 28 edition, "Curbs on Smokers Continue to Grow."

It notes that the ability for individuals to inflict their second-hand smoke on others is diminishing amidst new laws and regulations. Prominently featured is news that beginning New Year's Day, corporate titan 3M Corporation will no longer pemit smokers anywhere on its headquarters campus, thus workers and visitors that wish to indulge their nicotine addiction will have to travel at least a quarter mile from the site to a strip mall that apparently permits smoking outdoors.

Companies and governments have come to recognize that not only are there immense costs inflicted by employee smokers, but that second-hand smoke is indeed a first-class carcinogen as declared by the United States Surgeon General in 2005. I am sure that the feathers of smokers will be ruffled and that there will be claims of "nanny state government" and "nanny employers" as increased restrictions are imposed on them, but their protestations are increasingly likely to fall on deaf ears. There is increasingly no "right" to engage in a lethal drug addiction when to do so negatively impacts others. We can already look back with astonishment that there was a time when individuals could light up a cigarette at work, in restaurants, and in stores, fouling the air for others. Now if only casino workers and visitors would be included in the ban, greater progress could be claimed. 

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