But I may be misunderstanding you here, or in need of clarification on your position regarding smoking bans.
I'm just trying to figure out where you feel you might disagree with the position CASAA takes.
Smoking bans? When the various "clean air" anti-smoking movements began sprouting up in the 1960s-70s, it was with the intention of making it possible for non-smokers to go to the workplace, sit on an airplane etc., without being inundated with cigarette smoke. I'm fine with that. In most parts of the US at least, this battle was won by, say, 1990. But at some point this so-called ANTZ movement morphed into something else entirely, and became a control issue rather than a clean indoor air issue. There is no reason on earth that space can't be made for everyone, so I absolutely oppose smoking bans on the zero tolerance level.
I used to work in a hospital that had discreet smoking lounges on each floor, equipped with the necessary ventilation systems to ensure that non smokers walking by wouldn't be affected, and no one was. This should have been enough, but it wasn't, not because ANTZ were having smoke blown into their faces, but because they couldn't stand
the idea that someone else might choose to smoke, and wanted to live in a conceptual universe in which the practice did not exist. For a few years after they removed the indoor smoking, they kept one smoking room extant in the psych units, because some compassionate physicians with clout believed that punishing psychiatric patients already under mental/emotional distress by depriving them of tobacco was cruel, a sensibility I most certainly share. But eventually this room (which 99% of the staff of the hospital were no doubt unaware of, much lest bothered by) was taken away too...
... Then you began to see staff as well as patients in hospital gowns & wheelchairs smoking in the snow, which undoubtedly embarrassed the politicians and hospital administrators, so outdoor smoking had to be banished, too.
My alienation from CASAA and these forums discussion guidelines doesn't stem from the harm reduction idea argument per se, which I suppose I agree with as far as it goes. Rather, my alienation is this: The notion that we as vapors are somehow "different" and more "respectable" than other target groups who have already been successfully persecuted by oligarchic, top-down power, and therefore deserve preferential treatment because what we do "isn't as bad" as what those other people do. This presumes both the moral and legal legitimacy of the coercive power relationships as they currently exist. In other words, the message is: "We acknowledge your right to oppress x, y and z, but we want a "special dispensation" and plead for the grace of your kind permission to have one." That there are whole, vast areas of recent American history and current policy that we are not even allowed to allude to on these forums speaks to this strategy.
