By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
"Charlottetown police shut down three bootleggers - full-service bars in suburban homes - only to find them back in operation the next night, Super Bowl Sunday. A PEI tradition, the house-based bars seem to have become more popular because of a smoking ban in licensed establishments." - Maclean's Magazine, February 16
The foregoing is v-e-r-r-r-y interesting, to paraphrase whomever.
I have begun to wonder in latter years how long it will take present restrictive smoking laws to provoke a measure of backlash from what has become a small but very addicted minority of Canadians.
As previously confessed, I was a 40-years-plus-a-few smoker with little hope of ever beating the habit. I became addicted to tobacco from my first inhalation of the beautiful but obnoxious substance. I might be tempted smugly to admonish other slaves of the weed to give it up, as I myself did successfully. I admit my conversion came about through a medical development that made it physically impossible for me to ingest smoke for a week or two. No one had to forbid me the pleasure. But after a few days of denial, I came to the shocked realization I did not even miss it.
Freed from restraint, there was only one day of equivocation until I felt secure in abstention.
I realize not everyone might share my good fortune. I also was assisted by the gradual falling-from-grace of the smoking custom, and coming with it the realization that the attitude of smokers like myself had been insufferable. Most or many of us thought smoking was a God-given right so entrenched, that there had to be something wrong with those who loathed and suffered from what we accepted as a deliciously altered atmosphere.
When smoking became restricted, I moved unwillingly from the position that this was an imposed hardship that could not last, to the realization that non-smokers had a valid point, and finally to full admission that we, the smokers, had been the villains.
Now, however, the situation has reversed itself to the point that use of the product is unlawful in any place (in some jurisdictions), without even a separate space for the unholy, and I begin to wonder how far it can go without backlash.
Every morning and afternoon at about the time of the traditional coffee break, walk by any business place and you see the wretched addicts huddled in little groups away from the heat, the cold, the rain, the snow or the wind, often scantily attired, and puffing assiduously at their pathetic soothers.
Oddly enough, this is in a time when we are offering sterile needles to drug addicts, and offering help to prostitutes and compulsive gamblers.
At the height of prohibition in the U.S., the solution came in the form of "speak-easies", a term that defines itself. I visited a few such places myself in 1950 Des Moines, where antiquated liquor laws still were deeply entrenched.
You might say smokers still are permitted to smoke in their own homes. Hey! - with children sharing the space? How long can that last anyway?
Tobacco companies allegedly caused addiction deliberately, and have been fined big-time. If we believe that, where is our concern for their victims?
Mark my seldom-so-certain words: something has got to give.
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