Historically, tyrannical oppression is implemented incrementally. The next hammer falls after the populace has more or less already become inured to the effects of the last hammer and come to see it as status quo.
When the antismoking indoor clean air movement began, it was with the entirely understandable intention of enabling people who disliked cigarette the right to go to work, shop and use public transportation without having to navigate through a haze of tobacco-saturated air. Nothing wrong with that. Where I live at least, these objectives were largely achieved by the early 1990s, with smoking successfully compartmentalized in such a way so that no one who disliked it had to deal with it at all. This movement coincided with a growing sense that tobacco is "bad for you" (Surgeon General reports et al), and more and more people were motivated to quit. Nothing wrong with that either.
But somewhere along the way this movement morphed into something else, becoming socially coercive and morally dictatorial. Many people, such as my father, in that generation, would say: "I need to quit these bloody things", and many did. But it would never have even occured to my father that either smoking or quitting smoking would be anything but voluntary... At the time, the universal sentiment was that freedom on those levels was what separated the USA from the USSR, and it wasn't even talked about in those terms; it was just taken for granted...
... Fast forward to 2013: We have vapers trying to convey that vaping is not "wrong", or at least not "as wrong" as cigarette smoking, because it's just assumed that we don't have the right to do something unless we can prove that it's not as wrong as the many other things we're already not allowed to do. Alas, most people, even on these forums, have succumbed to the propaganda that casts this as a public health issue. But it's not; it merely masquerades as one. It's a human rights issue, plain and simple. Just as the old religious puritanism used God and Jesus to impose dominance over the peasantry, effectively justifying submissive codes of conduct, indentured servitude & slavery etc., the new secular puritanism uses the gods of health science, public safety and insurance liability to justify the same ends. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
