Anti-Smoking Zealots Are the Real Threat : Smokers may be annoying, but they don’t warrant a replay of Prohibition.

Whether you smoke or not, aren’t there times when the sheer arrogance of the anti-smoking zealots gets to you? My turning point came some years back at a New Year’s Eve party in Georgetown. There I was, standing in the corner of a high-ceilinged drawing room watching several well-heeled hemp-heads pass around a joint. While I don’t believe in better living through chemistry, I do believe in minding my own business, so I said nothing. I did, however, decide to smoke a cigar.

Boy, was that a mistake. Just as match touched Macunado, an enraged harridan, still bleary-eyed from her last drag of controlled substance, snarled, “You don’t think we’re going to let you smoke that thing in here, do you?” She was breaking the law, not me--and it wasn’t even her house. Yet she was coming on like a cross between Carrie Nation and a puff adder on Benzedrine.

How reminiscent of the style and strategy of that famous pioneer anti-smoker, A. Hitler, late of Berchtesgaden. In “Mein Kampf,” he reminded aspiring fellow social engineers that “strength lies not in defense but in attack.” Anti-smokers have been getting more offensive ever since.

Consider “passive smoking.” In the early 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency found that, using its established risk standards, it could not link passive smoking to statistically credible health risks. What happened? Instead of admitting that it had lost fair and square, the EPA changed the rules to get the results it wanted, adopting blatantly skewed standards. As one anonymous senior public-health researcher confessed in a 1992 article in “Toxic Pathology”: “Yes, it’s rotten science, but it’s in a worthy cause. It will help us get rid of cigarettes and become a smoke-free society.”

This past June, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler engaged in a similar act of deception before the House subcommittee on health and the environment when he claimed to have uncovered a sinister plot on the part of the tobacco industry--specifically the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.--to raise nicotine consumption by developing a new, secret “Y-1” hybrid tobacco leaf in Brazil.

Sounds very ominous, but it turns out that the primary reason for the Y-1 research was to develop a lower-tar, not higher-nicotine, leaf. In addition, far from being a sinister “secret,” Y-1 research was well-known to several federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, which had actually developed the tobacco-breeding line that became Y-1.

Smoking may not be a nice habit. It may be dumb and it may be annoying. So are nose-picking, humming off-key, failure to use a deodorant and voluntary public flatulence. Smoking can be unhealthy for the person who does it. So can wolfing down vast amounts of low-class, high-cholesterol junk food of the kind beloved by our non-inhaling commander in chief. But there is no conclusive evidence that “passive” smoke poses a scientifically demonstrable health hazard to nonsmokers.

Prohibition was the most disastrous social experiment the United States ever indulged in; it was also the most politically correct one by the standards of the time. It was pushed through--step by step, year by year, culminating in national prohibition of alcoholic beverages in 1920--because, in the words of a popular writer of the day, George Ade: “The nondrinkers had been organizing for 50 years and the drinkers had no organization whatever. They had been too busy drinking.” Never again.

Even the usually interventionist New York Times has sounded a skeptical note about the FDA’s claim that it has no intention of banning cigarettes. “It gets tricky,” we read in the July 2 issue, “because if the FDA declares nicotine an addictive drug--the almost inevitable next turn in this fast-moving plot--the legal wheels start turning in auto pilot: If it’s a drug, the FDA must declare it safe, which is impossible . . . .”

The last thing America needs is yet another piece of Catch-22 interference from the federal social police. Do me a favor, Uncle Sam. Get off my back and out of my lungs. And--if that’s what they want to do--let my people smoke.