There's also the issue of SUVs, which run rampant on our roads, guzzling gas and spewing out pollution. One person's right to drive a behemoth infringes on another's right to clean air, much like the issue of secondhand smoke, but with two important differences. One, you can't choose which roads to use. And two, smokers puff away for their own pleasure, and any harm caused to others is purely accidental.
Many other local issues also were kicked to the curb, thanks to the enthusiasm of antismokers, who signed up in such numbers at City Council that a special rule was instituted, limiting the time for each speaker to one minute. While antismokers babbled on and on about their right to enter someone else's establishment and dictate how they were going to be served, a woman in a wheelchair whose house was flooding had her time cut short. While antismokers touted their right to eradicate the rights of others, the family of a woman on death row wasn't given ample time to make the case for what seems to be her innocence. And apparently few people noticed when the homeless population was removed from the Pierce Elevated and dumped in low-income neighborhoods around town.
Daniel Kramer
Todd and Lisa Line met on account of smoking.
Daniel Kramer
Dennis Keim puffs away at Cecil's on West Gray.
Related Content
More About
Thin in the End
Lisa Line has always been a looker. Even now, post-childbirth and firmly in her thirties, she has a thin waist and curves everywhere else. You can chalk some of it up to diet, but puffing half a pack a day definitely helps.
Fact: Smoking burns 200 calories a day.
Lisa knows her insides might be less than stellar, but she doesn't see much point in living forever. "Okay, so we're going to be in adult diapers, no teeth, drinking our food through a straw?" she says, copping a bit from comedian Denis Leary. "Take those fucking years. I don't want 'em."
Fact: Houston is America's fattest city, at least according to Men's Fitness. We won this dubious title back from Detroit, after holding it two years straight. The magazine's methods are far from scientifically rigorous, but one look around (and we do mean "around") testifies to how big we have all become.
"Put that chicken leg down and take a puff," advises Lisa, only half jokingly.
Fact: Obesity has been linked to all kinds of diseases and health conditions, including hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, gallbladder disease, strokes, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and cancer.
The prevalence of diabetes has nearly doubled in the American adult population over the last ten years, thanks in part to our burgeoning obesity epidemic. This phenomenon has engendered a new term: diabesity.
Fact: Diabesity kills, and it leaves a super-sized corpse.
We're not suggesting that everyone out there take up smoking as a means of staying thin, although it would make for a more attractive populace.
What we are suggesting is that City Council overstepped its bounds by enacting the smoking ban, placing the success of the hospitality industry and its workers in jeopardy, all the while ignoring the social benefits of smoking as well as a slew of more pressing issues. Kids shouldn't take up smoking, but when it comes to rational adults, we think choice is a good thing.
Call us crazy.
