Whether it ends up a tipping point
for the remainder of Louisiana, at the very least the moderate-ranging smoking
ban to begin in New Orleans this spring is significant.
Last week, the City Council passed
it along to Mayor Mitch Landrieu,
who is expected to sign it. Slightly watered down from the initial draft, it
bans smoking in all indoor public places and even a few outdoors, except where
smoking accessories are made or sold and in private homes. Significantly, this
exceeds in reach state law on the matter.
The question now is whether this
will have an impact statewide. New Orleans arguably is the largest city in the
state and certainly part of the largest metropolitan area, and the most
tolerant, until now, of a smoking culture. Now with perhaps the least likely and
largest of places in the state for a local government having exercised its powers
given to it by the state to protect the health and safety of the public,
possibly this could burst through remaining resistance at the state level for a
similar kind of ban as some other states have legislated.
Probably not, at least in the short
term. Chances are that various lobbies – tobacco, restaurants, but particularly
casinos – can run successfully enough the argument that the state law should
serve as the minimum standard and if, like New Orleans, Alexandria, Ouachita
Parish, etc., local governments wish to go further, they will – a self-serving
argument because these more effectively can concentrate resources to discourage
such laws on locations rather than statewide. Over the long run, the tide
continues to recede in favor of smoking in public, as less than a fifth of
Americans now do it, and more
and more state and local governments have begun to restrict the practice
further and further. Eventually, that should catch up to Louisiana at the state
level.
As well it should. While all of arguments
based on civil liberties, civil rights, and economics affirm the prevention of smoking
in public places, the most parsimonious justification is that in places of
public commerce people have a right not to be interfered with by a voluntary activity
practiced by others that at the very least is obnoxious, and at worst, for the
unlucky few whose physical conditions disallow them the luxury of choosing to
react in any other way, is life-threatening. Why should a minority be allowed
to create “no-go zones” that inconvenience many and physically sicken others?
What right do business owners have to restrict commerce (and employment opportunities)
in this fashion?
Such regulations do not fall under
some “nanny state” rubric, where the state overregulates because it wants you
not to practice something its thinks is harmful to yourself, but instead genuinely
protects the liberty of others who are negatively affected by the behavior of
smoking (and, medical science suggests, yourself as well). If it’s left up to
the right of that minority that voluntarily wishes to smoke versus the right of
the majority that involuntarily must endure it or be put into respiratory distress
because of it, and therefore the two cannot occupy the same at once, prudence
dictates that the smaller number who voluntarily provokes must acquiesce to the
greater who have not acted in a way to instigate others’ discomfort.
Louisiana ideologically has a
conservative public and this decision’s upholding the right of noninterference that
prevents the negative consequences of someone’s life choices to be asserted
onto others fits neatly into that. At the same time, old cultural totems don’t
fall easily. Whether this tips other local government towards similar laws or
within a few years becomes replicated at the state level is uncertain. But it
certainly creates significant impetus in that direction, likely to the point of
inevitability.
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