Addict driven
“I’m basically a libertarian. I don’t want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it’s going to harm me. I don’t want [to] pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It’s just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we’re going to have different aspirations.”
—James Watson
Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA
If you examine this statement, there is a contradiction. Smoking's harmful. I don't think we should outlaw smoking and I also believe in legalizing other substances, especially marijuana. In a libertarian society a business owner should be able to decide whether people can smoke in their place of business or not. This climate of regulation needs fine tuning. It's my perception there are an increased number of smokers who don't even smoke in their own houses any more. For one thing it devalues the property. It's almost impossible to clean that smell out of a house. It seems to me, some addicted smokers are so influenced by their chemistry they will refute the facts of secondhand smoke. With the economic climate of having to cater to all clientele, the government stepped in to ban smoking in all public places, including restaurants and some bars, which has caused a huge chasm between smokers clamoring for rights and non-smokers clamoring for rights. If you isolate the one factor that secondhand smoke is toxic and harmful, you still open up a debate. So it needs to be coupled with other factors to equate a sum. It's a mystery to me why this is even an issue, in this day and age, of all the facts and information, that people can't just recognize what they do is, even if they disagree with the harmfulness, to at least say, well, my smoke is smelly and maybe people who are eating don't like to smell a cigarette. But instead, the government made a regulation. So, I consider that anti-libertarian, and unfair to the business owners. So as I said earlier, it's kind of a gray area. I can only surmise as a non smoker there is some chemical in cigarettes that makes smokers very loyal and under a strong influence.
