Quick Thoughts on The Smoking Ban

Annahar’s cartoonist spreads a common fallacy

You’ll be hearing a lot of protesting today from people who are shocked that the law will actually come into effect. This should be expected, and those in support of the ban should be ready for it. After all, this is a big lifestyle change to many people and people don’t like change.

As a supporter of the ban, you’ll be hearing a lot of arguments on why what the government is doing is bad, pointless, evil, or ill-timed. There are many good responses to those arguments, and you can find some of them here. But I want to focus in this post on two arguments:

1- This is about “freedom”

I have no patience for the crass argument that the government is infringing on people’s right to smoke in public, but there’s a more sensible, nuanced and respectable “freedom” argument. It’s the libertarian argument which goes along the lines of: “If people want to kill themselves, they should have the freedom to do it in a place where they don’t hurt anybody else”. This is an argument in support of dedicated cigar lounges and arguileh cafes (it’s also an argument for brothels and porn cinemas, but I digress). One person from the restaurant business made that argument in a comment on a previous post.

My outburst against arguileh cafes notwithstanding, I actually support that argument. I do believe that the law should be amended to accommodate these places. But I think it should be done very carefully, with strict definitions of what arguileh cafes and cigar Lounges are. It should be stated in the law that these places serve very little food. Otherwise we get into loophole galore where each person with a restaurant will call his place an arguileh cafe to get away with breaking the law.

2- The Government should focus instead on the “big issues”

This is the one we hear most often in Lebanon. There are many shades of this argument, and they often have something to do with the Meqdads or Hezbollah’s weapons or the fighting in Tripoli (case in point, the cartoon above). It’s that the government is leaving the big issues of illegal weapons and focusing on the small potatoes of banning smoking. It’s the 3am yet2awoo 3alayna argument.

In the cartoon above, the smoker is portrayed as a small helpless man among large, scary-looking outlaws. But the reality is that smoking kills 3500 people a year in Lebanon, a number far greater than the amount of victims of armed gangs. In other words, while the Meqdads and Hezbollahs get all the publicity and news coverage, smoking is a much bigger and scarier killer of the Lebanese people.

The government did indeed make the right, pragmatic choice on which issue to tackle regarding people’s safety. It has chosen the biggest killer of all.