The city of Calabasas CA, an upscale Los Angeles suburb, has passed the most stringent, restrictive, useless and asinine anti-smoking policy in North America. And they’re totally proud of it.

Get this: It is now prohibited to smoke in any public places within the Calabasas city limits, inside or outside. Yes, you read right. Outside smoking is ALSO prohibited. Unless, as the bill dictates, you can be sure that no one will be around to breathe the "toxic" second-hand smoke. In city council spokesman Michael Hafken’s own words, "If it’s 3 AM and that you’re walking on the sidewalk, it is reasonable to think that there’s nobody around you. In that case, you will be able to smoke in a public place. Some cities in the state already prohibit smoking in parks and on beaches for sanitary reasons. We’ve decided to take it to the next level", adds Hafken. And the fine if you get caught is quite steep: 500 bucks, which is more than abusive and a stupid excuse to make money off of the backs of citizens if you ask me. This is making me too angry as a freedom-loving individual. I’ll stop here, I think.

What’s sad is that it’s another crippling regulation coming down on smokers’ heads, which are probably the most oppressed minority in North America, and the only one it is politically correct and "right" to pick on. It really looks like fascism. Fascism OK’d by political correctness.

Of course, this could only happen in California, the toughest state in the union when it comes to tobacco legislation. After all, California is the one and only state that actually classified environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) as a "toxic pollutant", arguing that it claims something close to 52,000 deaths in the United States every year, 3,000 occuring by way of lung cancer.

Now, I have always been pretty skeptical of anti-tobacco lobbies simply because of the fact that they just seem to try too hard. They push too far and try too hard for everything that they advocate and that they "believe in" to be completely true. They’re really buttering up the evidence, if any. So I decided to do a little of my own research on the Internet. Here’s what I found out:

This, like about 90% of the data anti-smoking lobbies throw at us to scare us, is based on nothing, and therefore requires to be regarded as totally unfounded crap. You see, anti-smoking lobbies have an agenda, and that’s curbing down as much as possible the people’s freedom to smoke. Using any means whatsoever, be they justified or not. The ends justifies the means, and they don’t mind lying to the world to get their agenda across. The fact is that the first-ever second-hand smoke (SHS)-related death STILL remains to be seen. SHS does not kill or bring any sicknesses. And the 1990s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study anti-smoking groups are "basing" their computer-generated simulated death tolls on was totally bogus and flawed. But this was never released to the general public. The EPA has never found a sufficient link between second-hand smoke and diseases of any kind, in fact, there’s almost just as much evidence to "prove" SHS is harmful to non-smokers than there is to "prove" SHS is beneficial to them! But there’s even worse. Anti-tobacco lobbies had started to fund a study in the British Medical Journal on SHS and possible related health diseases. When the study found no connections whatsoever between the two, anti-tobacco turned their backs on it and halted funding.

Before coming out with the SHS scam, anti-smoking lobbies had no way to have their way of making tobacco illegal, and making more people quit smoking in fright that it’ll hurt their loved ones, because nobody knew about SHS. It gave them a tool to fight smokers, because now, they wouldn’t only say they hated the smell of smoke in restaurants, bars, shopping centers and public places, now they could also say it killed non-smokers and made them ill. So now SHS would become a public health concern, leading to making smokers, who are a part of our friends, families, neighbors and co-workers, total antisocial pariahs.

But wait, there’s more: When society was first confronted to the now "acknowledged reality" that SHS killed non-smokers, restaurant, bar, shopping center owners and others implemented more separate sections in public places, well-outlined and ventilated, where people could smoke freely in one section while no SHS would flow to the other, incommodating people that didn’t wish to be. When anti-tobacco lobbies saw that coming, they understood that this righteous compromise undermined their plans for the future. So they pressured ventilation system manufacturers and lobbies in that area of the economy to declare that "no degree of appropriate ventilation is sufficient" to eliminate the risks of SHS, hence leading to stupendous and false claims such as "the only thing that can accurately clear particles from SHS is a tornado", and the like. Before the anti-tobbaco lobby’s pressures, the degree of ventilation that "accurately clears tobacco smoke" was well-known. Plus, it’s not very high. And if a ventilation system still can sufficiently clear smoke from burning wood or paper, why is it suddenly "insufficient" to clear tobacco smoke, which has, I believe, about the same chemical properties? Tobacco smoke is no more harmful than any other kind of smoke. End of the line.

Finally, as are other "statistics" published by the anti-smoking lobbies on smoking-related deaths in smokers themselves, they too are highly exaggerated and distorted to a level you can’t possibly imagine. Anti-tobacco lobbies say 1 in 3 smokers will die from a smoking-related disease. Those are computerized simulations and are very far from the truth. And they also include real deaths of real people who never even smoked in the first place. Yep. When they see that someone dies from lung cancer or emphysema, they’ll automatically tag him/her as a "smoking-related death", even if they don’t check whether the poor guy or gal smoked or not in his/her life. And if he/she did, to which amount.

Why do our governments, federal, state/provincial and city-level buy into this crap? I don’t get this. Why are they so softly-spined and without willpower to face those anti-smoking zealots who want to dictate us how to live our lives? Because it also fits big government agenda, they can raise taxes on tobacco products to stratospherical limits, they can seize more control of the people they govern, and they can make tons of money off lawsuits. 

You have the right to believe me or not. But that’s what I believe. Just like with greenhouse gases "supposedly" causing global warming, ideology and dogma torture science, and always seek to have their way with it. And I’ll support it with some links, look below for my sources.

Do your own research, and come to your own conclusions.

They say smoking is not a healthy habit. I concur. But, as Bureaucrash puts it on one of their t-shirts for sale, it’s certainly healthier than fascism.

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Sources:

"Fini les clopes à Calabasas", Alexandre SIROIS, La Presse, Monday April 3rd 2006

"Calif. City bans public smoking", AP, FOX News, Sunday March 19th 2006

On Smoking / Smoking FAQ, by Derek R. AUDETTE:          http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/smoking.php  http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/smokingFAQ.php

THE SMOKING ISSUE, An essay by Joe Jackson: (Yes, Joe Jackson the popular singer!) http://www.joejackson.com/smokingissue.htm (THIS IS ESPECIALLY GOOD - READ IT THOROUGHLY)

The facts, by Dave Hitt: http://www.davehitt.com/facts/

"In defense of smokers", by Lauren A. Colby: http://www.lcolby.com/

FORCES International: http://www.forces.org/evidence/files/pas-smok.htm

C.A.G.E. (Citizens Against Government Encroachment) on Tobacco: http://www.cagecanada.ca/index.php?pr=Tobacco