New Curbs on Cigarette Smoking

Your editorial included an analytical error that is often made in the debate on smoking. The editorial conflated the harms that smoking causes to nonsmokers and the harms that smoking causes to smokers. Nonsmokers will only obtain a right to breathe smoke-free air if they avoid basing their arguments on the view that smoking is bad because it harms smokers. Tobacco companies are on their surest footing when they argue against paternalistic legislation.

Harms to nonsmokers caused by passive tobacco smoke are serious. Estimates of annual deaths to nonsmokers resulting from passive exposure range from 2,500 to 12,200. The children of smokers are in a very precarious position. They are much more likely to suffer from pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.

The people who need government’s protection are the 70% of adult Americans who do not smoke and children, not the 30% who continue to smoke despite knowledge of smoking’s lethal nature. Individual nonsmokers should consider suing smokers for civil battery, as they would for any other form of intentional harmful or offensive contact.

There is less that children can do to protect themselves from parents who smoke. Perhaps the state should make smoking in a home with small children prima facie evidence of child abuse. These actions would emphasize the fact that while smokers may choose to harm themselves, they have no right to harm others.

DAVID B. EZRA

Long Beach