THERE IS NO question that tobacco is bad for people. Smoking has been linked to lung and heart disease. Chewing tobacco is a cause of mouth and lip cancers. Smoking and chewing are bad ideas.
People who do not use tobacco should not start. People who do use the fragrant weed should do their best to quit.
That does not mean that smoking bans — now so popular — are always a good idea.
It is one thing to tell people who are free to move about a community that they may not smoke in certain places. It is another thing entirely to tell people who do not have freedom of movement that they may not smoke in any place they are permitted to be.
California is finding that out. This week, The Associated Press reported that the state’s ban on tobacco in prisons has had unintended consequences.
The result of the ban has been the creation of a black market for tobacco — any tobacco. Cigarettes, always a form of currency in prisons, are now being smuggled into prisons and sold for as much as $125 a pack. As the prices have gone up, so have discipline problems. At one prison, guards had to use pepper spray to break up a melee involving 30 inmates.
The ban is also undermining the discipline of prison staff. Not only do guards face increased risks dealing with discipline problems, but some guards and other employees are among those who have been caught smuggling tobacco.
The tobacco ban was imposed for the best of reasons — to make prisoners to live healthier lives and to save the state money on health care for inmates.
Prohibition of alcohol in the United States was also done for the best of reasons, and it caused the same unintended consequences.
In both cases, government banned popular and previously legal drugs. By creating a new class of crime, the bans created new classes of criminals — those who deal in the illegal substance and those who continue to use the drug.
The users are, to one degree or another, addicted. To feed their addictions, they are likely to do their best to break the new laws. In either a nation or a prison, the result is a breakdown of civil order.
During Prohibition, people for whom alcohol was not important broke the law anyway. Buying from bootleggers and going to speakeasies became more than just a way of getting a drink. They became socially approved ways of rebelling against the intrusion of government into personal lives.
Perhaps it is time for California and other places that ban tobacco in jails and prisons to heed the lesson of Prohibition and scrap those bans. The problems they create are as bad or worse than the problems they are intended to solve.
Better to allow a legal tobacco trade, designate smoking areas and at the same time offer inmates help and encouragement — and perhaps rewards — to quit.
All the bans seem to be doing is creating new criminals and making those criminals rich.
snowbird (anonymous) says...
Smoking is the least of all dangers facing an inmate.
He can be raped, wounded in a prison brawl, killed by another inmate; he can lose his wife, children and friends; even under the best of circumstances, his future is bleak.
And we want to turn this guy into a sweet, healthy-conscious New Ager?
This is like telling a starving man to stay away from non-organically
grown produce.
The anti-smoking lobby, mixing lofty ideals and authoritarian impulses, as most crusaders do, want inmates to take programs to help them break the habit.
Why would a method that often fails when applied to well-adjusted citizens be successful in the tense environment of prison life?
Depriving inmates of cigarettes is an imposition of middle class values on a population that is largely under-educated and thus, as statistics show, more likely to smoke.
Inmates are paying their dues and their cell is their home. How far can the state invade someone's privacy?
And what's next? A ban on fantisies and masturbation?
Can prisons be transformed into peaceful, healthy havens? Probably not.
If inmates receive unnecessary, cruel treatment, the backlash might be worse than whiffs of second-hand smoke.
Thomas W. Laprade
February 23, 2007 at 1:47 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
fxr (anonymous) says...
I totally agree with your commentary; it really is time to tell the truth about smoking. It would be irresponsible to do less considering how many may die as a result of common ignorance being dispensed in the media. Tobacco industry profits continue to grow while smokers in actual numbers have remained stable. Who is actually harmed by Tobacco control and where is the reasoning? We promote an increased nicotine addiction market, growing with the sales of unrestricted alternatives. Known to be more effective in creating addiction than any hope they will cure one?
The ability of industry lobbies to produce facts which do not exist is inexplicably aligned with conventional wisdom or a convenient truth. In 1950 more than half the population smoked and close to 100% were exposed to second hand smoke. Today the population has more than doubled and through out the last 57 years the same number of smokers and presumably the same effect would be found. The exposure levels have declined significantly and the US Surgeon General’s report can be cited here by more than 70%
Population percentages gives the well used illusion smoking has declined, in fact it has been held to a level which is entirely stable. In credible terms if the cause remains constant and the population doubles we should expect to see half the effect in population prevalence. What we did see was a tripling of smoking related diseases. What we have to understand as the theory which drives conventional wisdom, currently smoking cause of 20% of total mortality with less than 25% smoker prevalence as described by the lobbies and is demonstrated here to be false. What really caused those diseases and how many die annually as a result of misguided theoretic consensus? We fail to realize a true cause and effect could be found only if we end the denials of politicized science and actually start an investigation, of what have consistently been used by health scare advocates [likely the only credible concept they represent] describing them as “preventable diseases”.
When you apply a linear epidemiological model to a non linear situation the results will not be predictable or reliable, without a certain amount of predisposition applied to the conclusions and/or the model employed.
In moral, scientific and criminal terms defined undeniably as fraud.
February 25, 2007 at 12:17 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )