In Madison, as in many cities nationwide, there is an ongoing campaign to abolish tobacco use. On a Prior Post: The Smoke Wars there is a link to a detailed history of the anti-smoking movement in Wisconsin. Thursday evening the Wisconsin Assembly passed a bill requiring local governments to allow smoking in restaurants, taverns and other workplaces. The anti-smoking groups reacted in quick and predictable fashion and in fairness these are links: Smoke Free Wisconsin Response and American Cancer Society Response.
I support what the Assembly is doing not out of love for tobacco or for smoking in public, but rather because it touches on many of the issues important to the ongoing evolution of the society we design for ourselves. The health effects of direct smoking and the second hand smoke studies used by the anti-smoking movement have been covered extensively elsewhere, so I would like to point out a constitutional concern based on our First Amendment right to peaceful free assembly.
Municipal governments have re-defined smoking as a health matter which they then claim a right to regulate as a work place safety issue. An important aspect of smoking as a health concern is that it is not an imminent health threat like a viral or bacterial epidemic. On one hand, directly inhaling smoke from multiple packs of cigarettes, consistently over thousands of days, correlates with increased rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease. On the other hand, there is no evidence of immediate or short term life threatening consequences from tobacco smoke. Heavy smokers pretty much start dying off in their 50’s after years of the habit. This is a sad but tolerable fact within a free society allowing individuals to make both good and bad personal choices.
The First Amendment to the Constitution insures American citizens have the right to peaceful free assembly and no municipal government has authority to abolish this Federal right. None of the existing municipal ordinances claim smoking is violent or associated with violent activity. Smoking is a peaceful activity. None of the existing municipal ordinances claim smoking causes proximal life threatening consequences like cocaine and the opiates. The point the State Assembly is correctly making is that municipal government has the power to regulate where and when smokers can assemble, but absolute prohibition of a peaceful assembly exceeds the authority of local government. Personally, I have no problem with the concept of limited government power.
