Corte Madera Town Council members Tuesday voted 3-1, with Councilman Michael Lappert dissenting and Councilwoman Diane Furst absent, to ban smoking and the use of electronic cigarettes in both new and existing multifamily units. The ban will take effect May 2015.Just when you think the 'looks like smoking' witch hunt couldn't get more absurd, eh?
It's worth rewinding a few years and retracing the history of home smoking bans to properly illustrate how utterly insane this Town Council is.
Back in 2009, the City of Belmont in California (natch) enacted the first ban on smoking in private homes, a move which prompted a lot of coverage from US website Reason. In a video from November 2008, they explain how far removed from even tobacco control junk science the justification for home smoking bans is.
Note especially the hysterical rhetoric from councillor Dave Warden equating smoking in an apartment with shooting a gun through a wall. In fact, the original footage of that meeting - which now seems to have disappeared from the internet - featured a quote along the lines of "if you smoke, it's like you are reaching through the wall and shooting a child".
This, despite studies on second-hand smoke - yes, even those fabricated by anti-smoking organisations - showing that living with heavy smokers for decades presents a negligible risk, if at all. The idea that a faint whiff of tobacco from next door is the same as a bullet fired from a gun is laughable. Anyone suggesting such absurdities are quite obviously so dense they could bend light and would offer nothing but a vacant stare if you were to mention Paracelsus.
So what would these looney tunes call the danger of using an exponentially safer e-cig? Firing a water pistol, presumably.
They did, at least, extensively apply their scant intellect to the issue though ... perhaps in between breaks from trying to understand the instructions for a Lego starter kit.
Council members struggled with whether the town should ban the use of e-cigarettes and e-cigars in multifamily homes and public places as part of the ordinance.
While Condon and Councilman Bob Ravasio were completely in favor of banning e-cigarette use, both Lappert and Councilman Sloan Bailey were unsure it was the council's place to enact such a ban.
Lappert said it should be up to the state to determine whether e-cigarettes are a health hazard.Or even a health hazard for someone living with a fucking solid brick wall between them and the vaper, perhaps?
For Bailey, he wasn't sure there was enough proof that e-cigarettes are harmful.
"I don't agree with the philosophy that in absence of proof, you ban something," Bailey said.You're gonna love this guy's principled stance and stoic self-belief.
But after Condon, Ravasio and five members of the public spoke about the issue and referenced research on e-cigarettes, Bailey changed his tune.Because he hasn't got Google to look it up himself, obviously.
I'd love to meet this Bailey character, I reckon I could have some fun. Perhaps I could let him know that he owes me quite a bit of money.
DP: So when are you going to repay me that loan?
Bailey: I am not sure I owe you anything
DP: Well, actually, I say you do.
Bailey: Oh OK. Maybe I do.
Incredibly, the citizens of Corte Madera are condemned to suffer these retards running their town. I couldn't think of anyone less qualified, they don't appear capable of running a tombola.
So, in answer to Reason TV's question as to how far smoking bans will go, just 5 years after they pondered it we are already onto the use of devices which Belmont City councillors will not even have heard of when they enacted their ground-breaking home smoking ban.
Future historians will look back on the times we are living through and write books about the stunning stupidity of our era, while Horrible Histories will lampoon politicians like those in Corte Madera for kids to laugh at.
We, of course, don't have to wait that long. We merely have to sit and watch as amused eye-witnesses to a once-proud tobacco control industry as it - and its superlatively gullible followers - inexorably descends into farce. Aren't we lucky, eh?
