HOW HE SEES IT Nonsmoking push creates 'Nanny State'

By PAUL CAMPOS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
KALAMAZOO, Mich. -- To a resident of Boulder, Colo., it comes as a bit of shock to discover that one is allowed to smoke in the bars and bowling alleys of this Midwestern town. Boulder, like so many cities and towns across the nation, has made it impossible for smokers to indulge in their habit inside of public buildings of any sort.
As a nonsmoker, I've come to consider smoke-free space something akin to an absolute right. This is, in part, because since I'm almost never exposed to smoking, the smell of cigarette smoke annoys me much more than it used to. Thus I've become deeply intolerant of something I once treated as a minor irritation.
Our health police no doubt count my transformation into a hypersensitive prig as a triumph of public policy. The less tolerant people are of smoking, the less smoking there will be -- that is their logic.
And it's a sound logic, save for the suspicion that producing a nation full of hypersensitive prigs may be a steep price to pay in return for some marginal improvements in public health.
There has always been a strong puritanical strain in American public culture. A fascinating illustration of the persistence of that strain is provided by Yale Medical School professor David Katz's recent suggestion that "junk food" should be labeled with a scarlet J, to remind we who are about to consume of the depravity of our sinful nature.
A generation ago, a few libertarians joked that things like anti-smoking legislation were the first steps on the road to the serfdom of the Nanny State, in which red meat would be available only by prescription and a Twinkie would be treated as a dangerous weapon. As is so often the case, a previous generation's morbid humor is rapidly becoming the official position of all right-thinking people.
Let us review briefly the classic rationalizations for handing over our freedom to officious busybodies.
UThe average person is an undereducated victim of advertising, who can't be trusted to protect his own best interests. There's a lot of truth to that generalization. Unfortunately, the Nanny State's solution to this problem -- turning over decision making responsibilities to overeducated bureaucrats, who will impose their values on the wretched refuse of our teeming shores -- is worse than the problem itself.
Why, after all, should the neuroses of the American upper class, in the form of an obsessive compulsive concern for "health," narrowly defined, be legally projected onto everyone else?
UUnhealthy behavior produces costs that have to be paid by innocent bystanders. This is the favorite argument of those who recognize the force of libertarian objections to regulating private life. In theory, it's a potentially powerful argument. In practice, it depends on assertions that are often poorly supported or simply untrue. For example, the claim that second-hand smoke is a significant health hazard is far more dubious than public health officials would have us believe.
As for the billions of dollars in excess medical costs that this or that vice supposedly imposes on the virtuous, anyone who bothers to actually examine the evidence for such assertions will soon discover that these numbers are the products of something between educated guesses and flat-out fabrications.
Again, cigarette smoking provides a case in point: Serious economists who have studied the issue can't even agree as to whether smoking produces a net cost or benefit to our health care budget.
What nobody has any idea how to calculate are the costs of intolerance. Nonsmokers might want to think about that as we enjoy our Deviance-Free Zones.
X Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.