ALT-2 Are Drunk Drivers Punished as Effectively as Smokers
Drunk driving has been illegal for decades for obvious reasons: The impaired individual's reaction time is considerably slowed, vision is distorted, and the mind itself is altered. These people need to be kept off the road before they injure or kill themselves along with anybody else who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The death of an innocent person caused by someone driving drunk is as senseless as that of someone who happens to be hit by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting in some gang-infested neighborhood. Therefore, what was once punishable by a ticket comparable to something like speeding accompanied by a relatively small fine has been dramatically increased to license revocation, larger fines, re-education, and jail time, depending on the driver's history of infractions. In some states, repeat offenders can even be sent to prison.
Thus far as of this writing, operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol is a far more serious offense than publicly smoking in a restricted area. However, in a few years hence, it will be interesting to see what happens. Smoking ordinances were virtually unheard of before 1993; the year that the EPA proclaimed that passive tobacco smoke was harmful to nonsmokers. As we find ourselves some 15 years later, restrictions on smoking are rising at an alarming rate, even though there is no concrete proof that a single nonsmoker has ever died from someone else's smoking.
Quite simply, what it boils down to is that somebody; most likely a pharmaceutical company stockholder, decided that the smell of tobacco smoke was offensive and that if the practice of smoking could be denormalized by whatever means possible; junk science included, huge profits could be realized from the sale of cessation drugs. Politicians were subsequently lobbied by these drug companies, and now countless cities across the country have passed Fascist-like ordinances that not only have reduced smokers to the social equivalent of lepers, but also turned them into criminals as well.
It is the firm view of this author that smoking should be allowed anywhere in public as it was 20 years ago; provided the person is 18 or older. To prohibit this is to violate the person's basic civil liberties. In addition, business owners' right to free enterprise have been stripped away with forced smoking bans.
The title to this topic is a bit unsettling. Asking whether or not drunken drivers are punished as effectively as smokers suggests that tobacco users are just as much a threat to the populace as the former. Such an implication is preposterous.
It will be a disheartening day when smokers are put into the same category as those who drive drunk with reckless abandon, but unless some air of common sense is restored, I greatly fear that day will indeed arrive. When it does, I'm out of here. Besides, I love Mexican food.
