smoke ‘em if thou havest them

by Ian Schuldt

Published: March 10, 2008

As in most states, the Democrats won big in my home state of Minnesota in 2006. They ran on a platform of ending the war in Iraq and standing up to the Bush administration. Since then we’ve had a troop surge, a vote to continue funding the war and a veto of any attempt to rain in the rocket monkey we call our president. Don’t worry, though. I wouldn’t call the democratic congress a complete failure. They may not have done a single solitary thing they were elected to do, but they did manage to get us the state-wide smoking ban we’ve all been craving.

I know I can’t think of a single thing the people of this state wanted more than a smoking ban - well, except maybe for a cigarette. In fact so much more that they are willing to go to the bar dressed like Romeo and Juliet to do it. It turns out that there is a small loop hole in the smoking ban ordinance. It allows someone to smoke a cigarette as long as it is being done to enhance the mystic of a theatrical performance. Of course that can be interpreted quite loosely, so loosely in fact that it encompasses 300 people dressed up like Hamlet and reciting their best Shakespeare just so they can smoke a cigarette in a bar.

Too many people on both sides of the isle in this country seem to think that banning something makes it stop. The reality is that if there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to do something, then there would be no need to ban it in the first place. You’d think we would have learned this lesson from the years of prohibition. In trying to make alcohol illegal, we created a black market and a mafia with bosses so powerful that they had the manpower and the armaments to rival the actual government itself. It didn’t stop a single person from drinking, it just forced them to take extreme and sometimes even dangerous measures to do it.

Now I doubt there will ever be an Al Capone of theatrical smoking, but the problems stemming from the banning of things that don’t need to be banned do exist. And they are dangerous. I, for example, had my first beer when I was 17. Yes, I know the legal drinking age is 21, but it turns out I didn’t care. Since I couldn’t drink in a bar, nor in the privacy of either mine or a friend’s home, very often when my friends and I decided to drink we would do it in the only warm place you could get away with drinking on a cold Minnesota winter night… a car.

One of my best friends used to live exactly one block’s walking distance from four different bars and a liquor store. Because he was too young to go to any of them, he jumped in a car and drove 14 miles out into the middle of nowhere for a party at a house in another town. On the return trip, the driver of the car lost control going around a corner; my friend was thrown from the vehicle and died.

Now obviously drinking and driving is ridiculously stupid, and some would say his death was a result of poor decision making. This is why young people shouldn’t be allowed to drink. While that is partially true, the reality is that it was a decision he should have never had to make. He decided that if he couldn’t drink safely, he would just drink dangerously. This is a decision that people are forced with far too often. I would wager that on any given weekend there are over 100 young people driving drunk just in the tri-state area I grew up in alone.

Because of a law that was designed to protect minors who aren’t supposed to be responsible enough to drink, millions of minors all across America make the decision to drink irresponsibly every day. The reality is when you try and ban things like drinking, smoking, drugs, prostitution, guns and yes, even abortion, you don’t actually prevent them. You simply force people to take extreme measures in order to do it. Sometimes those measures result in a renewed appreciation of the theatre. Sometimes they result in a death. Neither needs to happen. If you really want to protect someone from themselves - educate them. You’ll find that solves far more problems than any law ever could.

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