I took an interest in your opinion found in today’s Virginian Pilot concerning the right of non-smokers to be free  from smoke in restaurants. You are offended by the argument that a patron also has the right to refuse a particular restaurant that allows smoking.  You wish to legally ban all smoking in restaurants.

In your argument to prohibit smoking in restaurants, you use health cost figures to the state of Virginia incurred by smokers. What you don’t give us is the cost of people who don’t smoke, live to collect Social Security, whose health expenses are covered by Medicare, and Medicaid, who will live far beyond retirement and enter nursing homes for another 3 to 10 years, again covered by Medicaid.  Let’s not forget the high cost of obesity and related ailments. Let’s also include catastrophic care for various transplants and  heart by-passes.

I’ll bet that obesity is more dangerous, and expensive,  than smoking.

Who then is most costly to society, the smoker who dies a premature death or the non-smoker who lives to be 90 at government expense?  Pray tell us. 

As a side insanity, a local school is being closed because asbestos has been discovered inside the walls.  Six hundred kids are displaced. The school must now receive an expensive renovation. But, there is no known case of a person working in such a place, (i.e. a school teacher) for 30 years and contracting an asbestos related cancer. Yes.  Asbestos is dangerous to workers who use it, install it, strip it, manufacture it, and breathe it directly all the days of their working lives. I liken it to coal and black lung. There is no known case of people who used to burn coal for heat developing black lung.  Miners, yes. Consumers, no.

Please, let’s not keep promoting imaginary  panic where none is due. Don’t we have enough real trouble  in the world as it is?  What do you hope to achieve by imposing more government controls on our individual freedoms?