The following editorial was submitted to the L.A. Business Journal on August 19; there is no guarantee of publication, of course, but it notes how Councilman Bernard Parks’ request for a ban on outdoor smoking follows a past, failed course of action:
PROHIBITION FAILED ONCE, IT WILL FAIL AGAIN
American philosopher George Santayana’s famed observation in Reason in Common Sense that "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" was penned more than 100 years ago. Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks has shown that he has either forgotten it or prefers to ignore it.
On August 8, Parks introduced a motion in the City Council asking the City Attorney to draw up an ordinance that would ban smoking in all public places where people would gather, including the common areas of apartment buildings. He says his proposal wouldn’t ban smoking per se, but would eliminate most of the negative effects of smoking on the public.
In other words, he’s in favor of Prohibition, but this time of tobacco.
It didn’t work with alcohol and it won’t work with smoking, either.
The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, didn’t ban the consumption or possession of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it stated that "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited."
Instead of eliminating drinking, it sent it underground, fostered the manufacture of "bathtub gin" and other substitutes that were often much more dangerous than the liquors it replaced, and jump-started the formation of organized crime on a national basis. Prohibition was such a failure that it is the only amendment to the Constitution to be repealed, in 1933.
Parks claimed in an editorial on the CityWatchLA.com Web site that his proposal wouldn’t impact the police, but who’s going to hand out tickets or make arrests of smokers who light up on the street, in a parking lot or walking into their own apartment? At the current level of 9,600 sworn officers and an estimated 384,000 City residents who smoke – not even counting an additional several hundred thousand who work in the City – there would be an average of one officer for every 40 smokers. Tracking smokes down should keep our police pretty busy and eliminate the time spent on less-important efforts such as gang intervention, traffic control, drug interdiction, burglary, robbery, rape and murder.
Prohibition is bad policy and the criminalization – if Parks has his way – of up to 998,000 people in Los Angeles County is bad politics. If Parks wants to eliminate smokers from hanging around in front of buildings or on street corners, smoking lounges should be authorized – with blacked-out windows – where those who smoke can go to consume a legal product, hidden away from the non-smoking majority.
But then, we would have learned from history instead of trying Prohibition again, a century after the first try failed.
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