I hear what you're saying to a point Que, but you do have to take the negative health effects of second hand smoke into account. The problem with the no tobacco zealots is that they ceased being reasonable once they started getting their way.
No smoking in bars and other indoor establishments is reasonable and logical. If you want to smoke, smoke outside so other people don't have to deal with it. Governments taxing the shit out of tobacco products in countries with government health care is also reasonable and logical. These kinds of things make sense and are probably good for society as a whole. But then you still have people complaining and what can you do? You can start a populist appeal for votes and stop being so reasonable.
The government in BC has recently passed a new set of laws regulating tobacco use. These are a bit less reasonable but just enough to not really piss anyone off. The ones I know of are no smoking in public places. As far as I know this includes bus stops, near doors, and near windows. Hey, fair enough, people don't want to stand in a 3/4 enclosed structure and breathe smoke. That makes sense. Although I think this also includes the bus stops that are completely outdoors....which makes little sense. Nevertheless, not really a bad move. The second part is kind of fucked. Stores can't have tobacco products in plain sight nor can their be any advertisements out there for tobacco products. This makes little sense, but I can't blame the government for believing that advertising creates impulses that must be obeyed at all costs...I mean, a lot of people are fucking idiots....usually the people getting involved in panels discussing things like this are the worst. If anyone thinks it's going to stop people from smoking or going to stop kids from smoking they're kidding themselves, but hey whatever.
So, then you have to wonder where it goes from here...because this is another victory for some people and it's only going to give them more confidence. There's a lawsuit in Sweden right now where a chick is being sued by her neighbor. The offense? Smoking on her own property more than 20 but less than 50 feet away from the neighbor. Sure, that's an extreme...but do you really think it couldn't happen here in a few years? Various governments (provincial, state, and federal) have already been involved in lawsuits against big tobacco. Strange isn't it, that they can sue the makers of a product they allow to be sold. Sue for what? Being harmful to health and addictive...facts that we've known for a long fucking time. You can't have been smoking for the last 25 years, get cancer and decide that you're the victim, you knew what you were doing. The same goes for the government....either tobacco products are legal to be sold and the government assumes it's population knows about the health risks or they're deemed too dangerous to be sold. No half-assed suing of big tobacco because of medical costs...those are covered by the sin tax.
And where does this go? I imagine in the next 20 years we see smoking being limited to private residences. At that point if the government was being sincere they would just come out in the next couple years and announce a phasing out plan where it will be illegal to sell tobacco (or just smoking tobacco) in stores and to use it in public, but chances are they'll still allow that due to the massive cash crop it is.
And people will still bitch. These are the same people that complain about loud music in cars, dogs barking, and a variety of other things that are really unavoidable if you want to live in a civilized society. The health issue is just a rallying point. These people know that the 3 seconds a day of second hand smoke they're most likely receiving won't kill them, just like they know being around cars, sick people in a city, and in the sun at all is bad for them.
Personally, I'm against government regulation of what you put in your body period...but the government has to go one way or the other here. People will complain about anything if they think someone will listen...it makes them feel passively-aggressive powerful after a hard day of being an absolute nobody at work, that's not going to change but for a government to go beyond the reasonable level of health concern is just a populist move that inches slowly more and more towards totalitarianism.
