The smoke gets thicker

Regarding the Calabasas ban on smoking in all public areas, I believe that the city council has gone too far.

It is my opinion that a person should have the right to do whatever they want to their bodies, so long as they don’t harm others in the process. By criminalizing smoking anytime a Calabasas citizen leaves his property, the city is in effect forcing people to stop smoking. As nasty a practice as smoking is, it still is not the role of government to nanny its citizens to follow a certain behavior unless that behavior is detrimental to others.

The obvious counterargument is that the harm incurred from secondhand smoke would warrant such a ban. However, we’re talking about Calabasas of all places. This isn’t a city like San Francisco or New York where you have many people milling about and coming into close contact with each other. In Calabasas, people conveniently shuttle themselves about in their fancy Escalades and Navigators, rarely even getting close enough to someone to be exposed to secondhand smoke.

The only areas where such comingling occurs is the Commons and the smaller shopping plazas and restaurants nearby. The ban would benefit people situated in confined outdoor areas, such as patio dining tables, or a line in front of a movie ticket window, where moving away to avoid secondhand smoke would be a great inconvenience.

Surprisingly though, the Calabasas ordinance allows for businesses to establish “smoking outposts” given that they are five feet away from any enclosed area. In other words, a smoker could be fined for lighting up in a wide open park with one person nearby, but could smoke in a crowded outdoor shopping plaza. Such thinking defies logic.

If the issue was just about secondhand smoke, then the ordinance would be applied only to areas where such smoke created unavoidable harm to others. By applying the ban to the entire city instead, Calabasas’ intent on attaining the title of the first completely “smoke-free” city in the nation is made plain to all. Nyein Sein Newbury Park