Village Squire, 1977-10, Page 42Anti-smoking bylaw serious, or a big joke
depending if you're smoker or smokee
BY KEITH ROULSTON
I see down in Toronto they've passed a
by-law that prohibits smoking in public
places and means restaurants and theatres
must provide smoking and non-smoking
sections. The reaction in the press and with
the police too, from what I can gather
through the press, has been that it's a big
joke.
Research says that a majority of people
these days don't smoke, but you'd never
know it by reading the papers. That's
natural, of course, becaute if you've ever
been in a congregation of journalists, you'll
realize it's like being in Detroit on a foggy
day: you can hardly see the faces for the
heavy haze that hangs over the room.
There's a good deal of talk these days
about what will happen if the world runs
out of oil. For journalists, a greater threat
wouid be if the world ran out of tobacco
though thankfully such a catastophe should
never occur since tobacco is a renewable
resource.
With such a vested interest in the use of
the weed then, it's hardly surprising that
the outcry against the anti-smoking by-law
has been led by the Toronto press. Most
often the protest takes the form of a
sarcastic putdown of the people behind the
non-smoking campaign and the ridiculous-
ness of the whole thing, telling people
where they can and can't smoke.
Sometimes the protest is in the form of a
diatribe against yet another ridiculous
restrictive law imposed by the government.
Or the journalists may comment on how
rude it is for people to say things like "Yes,
I do mind very much if you smoke."
Now I must admit that I have a personal
bias in the issue. I'm a rare bird in the
journalistic field. During 10 years in the
business of writing I have never once had a
cigarette, an admission that's enough to
have me drummed out of the profession as
unfit to call myself a journalist. Why it's
downright unpatriotic. Think of all the
revenue I'm stealing from the government
for the cigarette tax I'm not paying. And as
if that weren't bad enough, I'm gyping
them out of a lot of booze tax too with my
paltry purchase of one bottle of rye wiskey
and two bottles of wine a year at the
L.C.B.O.
What's more, I've been stealing other
people's smoke for years. I've probably
smoked a half a pack a day in the past
decade just breathing in the waste smoke
from other people's cigarettes. There
should be some way of charging me for
that.
I don't get too upset about, the smoking
40, VILLAGE SQUIRE/OCTOBER 1977.
business, one way or the other. I'm
certainly not going to jump - on the
bandwagon campaigning against the
anti-smoking bylaw but on the other hand,
I'm not so strongly against other people
ruining their health as to try to enforce non
smoking on them. It's not that I wouldn't
like too, often, but I'm just too much of a
Timothy Churchmouse to get nasty about
it.
I mean whenever somebody sits down at
a table and says to me: "Do you mind if I
smoke?" my reflex action is to say I don't
mind at all. Later, though, when they puff
stale smoke in my face or my eyes begin to
water from the smouldering cigarette they
left in the ashtray right under my nose then
I wished I'd developed the kind of self
assurance to tell them where to stuff their
cigarette.
It's amazing really that journalists were
among the crusaders against the evils of
big business polluting air or water a few
years back. They made the heads of these
companies seem like callous, money
grubbing maniacs who would ruin the
health of thousands for a few extra dollars
on the year-end balance sheet. Now.
however, these same journalists see
nothing wrong with polluting the air of the
person who sits across the table or in the
chair next to them. How pollution can be a
crime one minute and perfectly all right,
indeed a civil right of the polluter the next
is beyond me.
Ah, but I get my revenge for all the
smokey meetings I've had to cover over the
years when I've had to come home and
hang my clothes downstairs so the smell
wouldn't keep us awake all night. Maybe
you've seen that commercial nn television
where the lion tamer lights up a cigarette
and the lion sees it and is ready to pounce
on him and devour him until he quickly
puts out the cigarette and then the film
reverses and the lion goes back to being
gentle again. Whenever I've suffered at
the hands of some non -thinking smoker, I
imagine that scene...except 1 don't reverse
the film.
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