Smoking and pipe bans are ethical conundrums

Published on: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 by: Genevieve Diesing

Smoking in DeKalb has never been so controversial, and chances are you already have an opinion on the matter.

While residents and lawmakers squabble over whether cigarettes may be lit inside public buildings, The Huka Corner tobacco shop is trying to defend its legal right to sell glass pipes. Sooner or later, somebody will have to decide whether smoking should be publicly banned, and if tobacco shops should be allowed to sell a sizeable portion of their merchandise.

Parents, police, lawmakers, business owners, students and residents of DeKalb just cannot seem to make up their minds about the issue. And they should not have to.

When contemplating whether something should be banned, an all-or-nothing mode of thinking comes into play. The result of such drastic judgment inevitably yields a win-lose scenario - and it becomes very dangerous to declare which end is more significant in our day-to-day lives.

No one is going to argue that smoking is terrible for everyone's health. Some choose to smoke, others don't - but as long as people light up in confined areas, suddenly non-smokers no longer have a choice.

On another hand, a ban would not cause people to stop smoking - it might just persuade smokers to stop frequenting smoke un-friendly areas. Companies might face financial loss, and more importantly, bid adieu to saying how their businesses are run.

Stopping the sale of glass pipes could have a temporary effect on the amount of illegal activity for which they might be used. Yet this action again hurts the businesses that have every legal right to sell them.

Throughout history and politics, any group's consensus of what best serves the greater good is rarely achieved by one side merely dominating the other. Compromise must be reached in order to truly establish a harmonious environment. When comparing physical health to constitutional rights, it becomes impossible to determine which is more vital to our society.

The fact remains that public smoking is a problem. Second-hand smoke does infringe on the liberties of people who wish to avoid cigarettes. But an outright ban of smoking in public places would be a catch-22 - another intrusion on one's lifestyle choice and contravention of one's rights. Selling glass pipes that could facilitate marijuana use has the potential to worsen the state of DeKalb's drug consumption, yet prohibiting their sale altogether hurts a business that rightfully vends these pipes for legal reasons.

The only answer to this ethical conundrum is compromise, which a ban is most certainly not. What if smokers, in an effort to preserve their freedom, chose to make bars and restaurants healthier for everyone by waiting to puff outside? What if police focused more on apprehending evident illegal activity instead of punishing suggestive yet legal commerce? A ban could be avoided, yet the significant issues that motivated it could be effectively addressed.

Our goal as a society should be to respect as many people's rights as possible without taking their liberties away - to conserve our public's health while enabling our businesses to operate as they choose. Only then can we agree - and progress.