And ickiness was at the core of why hundreds of thousands of Washington smokers got voted out of bars and pretty much off the sidewalks by a bunch of soccer moms and their uptight husbands. How is it that a bunch of people who are in bed by 10 p.m., who go out maybe once a week, get to trump another's rights to drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes in a bar at midnight?
But those weren't the only moral scolds voting for I-901. Many of the votes for the measure came from people who also smoke marijuana and who two years ago voted to make marijuana enforcement the least priority of the Seattle police. I-75, as the measure was known, basically operated on this logic: "Dude, we know weed is illegal. But we like it and choose to smoke it. So we are going to tell law enforcement to not pay attention to state statutes and federal laws on pot. Just leave us alone in our private dwellings."
Illustration by Danny Hellman
Related Content
More About
I only wish I were exaggerating about this electoral dynamic. In recent weeks, I have encountered many voters who say they smoke pot but voted for the smoking ban. Typical stoner logic.
But I wonder how these same people feel now that both the state and King County have made it clear that they don't believe anyone has a right to smoke in their own residences. Smoke is smoke, right?
Presumption is the Coin of the Realm
But, of course, the nannies are after presumed ickiness all over America these days. And public-health departments are rapidly turning away from their traditional mission of public education and bacteria control to become power brokers in civic life. They seek to regulate how restaurants prepare baked goods in New York City. Earlier this month, New Jersey banned all indoor smoking (except in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City), and Chicago's ban on smoking in bars and taverns took effect Jan. 16.
It's like a Mormon fell in love with a Baptist and the two gave birth to a public-health official.
In San Francisco, citizens and politicians are so caught up in an orgy of uplift that last November they banned gun ownership and are trying to ban tobacco smoking from all public parks.
What's stunning to me is how far the antitobacco forces have gotten on banning smoking in bars and outdoors with little scientific evidence of harm. Last fall, I asked I-901 backers and public-health officials if they had scientific data establishing the level of harm arising from secondhand smoke in bars or from smoking within 25 feet of an establishment's door. Each of them admitted they had no such data.
Instead, they responded by calling the ban a workers' rights issue and the 25-foot rule a presumed safe distance. That's a hell of a presumption, but in Seattle presumption is the coin of the realm, politically.
Let me be presumptuous in return. What gives people who think smoking is icky the right—hell, the nerve—to have their social preferences rule every establishment in the state, sidewalks included? Why did they want to hang out where I smoked if they didn't like smoking in the first place?
Some Seattleites, no doubt, think such measures as the smoking ban and the four-foot rule at strip clubs are necessary to prevent civic rot. But, if you are thoughtful about these things, you'll recognize that strip clubs, smoking in bars and in front of coffee shops, and kids listening to hip-hop and punk and raging with their friends line up nicely with Seattle's self-image as a progressive, inclusive world-class city.
Because Seattle claims to be a world-class city (just ask Greg Nickels), a hub of commerce and culture that will entice the "creative class" from around the world and make the city famous for far more than coffee, grunge rock, and buggy operating systems. But the way things are going, Seattle will indeed be famous—known far and wide as Salt Lake City on the Sound.
I lived in Salt Lake City for five years. You don't want to live there. It's not a fun place.
pdawdy@seattleweekly.com
