Community Commentary:

If you were to be strapped down on a surgical table while four guys exhaled smoke directly into your mouth and nostrils for 30 years, you might get lung cancer 40 years after they stopped, but it’s not likely.

It really, truly gets me. There’s discarded nuclear waste off the East Coast, there is a huge spinning pile of plastic floating off the West Coast, factories unload chemicals into rivers, cancer-causing agents are added to our food, we eat contaminated meat and produce on a daily basis, cars pump out carbon dioxide, factories belch pollutants into the air every day — all day — and you are seriously worried about second-hand smoke and “educating” smokers?

Glendale and Burbank have become “police states.”

Complicating the issue is the media treatment of second-hand smoke. If you say something often enough, it becomes “truth” even if the original basis for it is or may be phony.

The anti-smoking conspiracy started with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And when it comes to those carrying out the current war on smokers, no other group matches their tactics, approaches and arguments as well as the Nazis. It’s a near perfect fit. The anti-smokers, of course, bristle at the comparison, quickly pointing out that they are not rounding up smokers and sending them to death camps. Hitler never did that to smokers either. He simply vilified them, taxed them, lied about them, restricted advertising of tobacco, and forbade smoking in public places. Comparing Hitler’s treatment of smokers to the behavior of today’s anti-smokers is a perfect apples to apples comparison. Is it really hard to admit that it is the smell and not the smoke of the cigarettes that’s the subject matter? The smell of cigars and cigarettes does not travel, the smoke travels and dissipates in the air! The only way to be bothered by cigarettes’ smell is to be standing next to an ashtray or next to a person who has smoked!

Let’s not start a whole new era of prohibition in which people have to open speakeasies and private clubs just to enjoy a meal or a drink.

Wouldn’t the American way be to put a big sign on the front of your restaurant — “People Smoke In Here, Don’t Come In If It Bugs You” — and then let everyone act like grown-ups?