It's About Time

CERTAIN SMOKERS love to whine about infringements of their rights. They love to call themselves an oppressed minority. They love to complain about allegedly totalitarian public restrictions on their obnoxious and filthy habit.

But let's get one thing straight. Just as a person's right to swing his fist ends when it hits another's nose, the right to smoke also ends where the non-smoker's nose begins. If you want to pollute your own lungs in the privacy of your own room, that's fine. But the smoker's right to spew carcinogens into the air disappears the moment someone else can breathe them.

The recent Adams House decision to ban smoking in the dining hall and other common areas is a long-overdue change in policy. The reason behind this change in policy is simple--the rights of non-smokers trump the wishes of smokers. No one should have to breathe smoke-filled air. And the Adams House dining hall was getting disgusting.

Some Adams residents called the decision, made by masters and tutors in the house, paternalistic. One called it an "Orwellian nightmare." Such a claim is laughable. Democracy should be practiced in most house decision-making, but the tyranny of the majority should never prevail. The decision was an appropriate intervention to protect the rights of non-smokers.

Over the last five years, scientific evidence has emerged to link passive smoking to more than 40,000 annual deaths from lung cancer and heart disease. Many scientists now consider passive smoking the third leading preventable cause of death in the country, behind active smoking and alcohol.

The weight of this evidence has accelerated the trend over the past decade to ban smoking in public places. Adams House is wise not to resist the trend. Breathing smoke-filled air is not only extremely unpleasant, but it can also be dangerous to health. Disregarding these health hazards would be the true nightmare.