Summer and NO Smoke

Jacob Sullum notes an AP article that confirms that New York's draconian new anti smoking law will prevent smoking on stage. From the AP piece:

...curbing such public displays of smoking could go a long way to the kind of societal change advocates of the smoking ban say is needed to get more smokers to stop and more nonsmokers not to start.

"Now, the image we have of a smoker is the person standing in the rain having a cigarette, and that is hardly the glamorous image we had in the '40s and '50s," said Russell Sciandra, head of the Center for a Tobacco-Free New York. "That's going to have a tremendous impact on children's perception of smoking."

Mr. Sullum comments:

Hence the ban protects the public not only from secondhand smoke but from pernicious ideas, such as the notion that there is anything "glamorous" about smoking.

Isn't it funny how the health commissars are acting more like... well... commissars? It's almost like the good old Stalin days. Soon they'll be airbrushing the cigarettes out of well know portraits... like Jackson Pollock and James Dean. Oh yeah... they already did that.