Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Dr Zen is no libertarian. I believe in "big government" and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I believe that the rich become rich because they have a society to live in, and of course I believe that everyone deserves the same output from a society that at day one they had nothing to offer. I take the Rawlsian line that rewards should be equitable and that we should not simply entrench an unlevel playing field by rewarding privilege with gain.

However, I oppose government nannying fiercely. I find it quite astonishing that a reasonably liberal government can think it is its business to try to convince its citizens not to smoke. The urge to suggest they fuck off must surely sweep over anyone who doesn't share more than half their genome with a sheep.

Of course, our state government pretends that its measures are to protect other citizens from secondary smoking but anyone who walks the streets of a Queensland city will, I think, be at more danger from the tonnes of particulates spewed by the motor cars that throng the CBD than they are from packs of marauding faggers congregating by the front door of their workplace.

Yes, smoking is nasty. But should distaste for a habit direct policy? It is, after all, the only thing that directs drug policy. For years, governments have claimed that pot is the devil's weed because it causes enormous harm or because it is a gateway to greater evils. It is neither, of course, as study after study shows, and now the prohibitionists are left only with their own moral sense as their reason for prohibiting it.

Of course, how we structure our world is not entirely guided by reason. I know for myself that my politics is based in my own moral sense, if you can call it that. Whatever philosophy of the world I adopt, it cannot ignore my deepseated feeling that the world ought not to be unfair. This tends to narrow down one's options in political philosophy but I'm sentimentally unable to ignore my emotions in creating my worldview and use pure reason. (Nor can I see why that should be desirable, mostly for the reasons that I'll give. Some, when discussing politics, seem to think that one can take the emotion out of it and simply apply cold logic to the world's problems. They ignore their own resort to "morality", which is ultimately almost always based in emotion rather than reason (for instance, our opposition to murdering each other is based in the sense that it's not a nice thing to do rather than anything functional or real).)

***

I gave up smoking a few years ago, shortly before Zenella was born. I regret it. It had all the benefits I thought it might: I am healthier on the whole, I do not stink of tobacco and I saved the money.

But no one mentioned the downsides: the chunk of my identity that I had to surrender, the doorway to social engagement it provided me, the space it created when I needed to calm down (and now I find that far too much of the time I am ratcheted up and cannot take it down a notch -- yes, perhaps I could find other means but I don't have the patience or ability to make it through meditation; and I'm led to drink far too much to quench the fires that smoking used to help control, and it is not a good solution at three in the afternoon anyway), the antidote to boredom and impatience. Even if I was artificially a better person, at least I was that.

Worst of all, I find it harder to concentrate, so that I write a lot less. Perhaps that is nothing to do with smoking and more to do with how I am, where I am and what I am.

Yes, I would have died sooner rather than later, but I don't want to be 75 anyway. I'd rather go out young and pretty with blackish lungs than become a wizened old fool who has spent the last forty years with good breath but a fucking bad attitude.

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:52 pm