Published: January 16, 2008 12:53 am            

LUCINSKI: Beware of what's good for you

We’ll say one thing for some politicians: They’re quick to feed on the carcass of what’s left of a good idea.

The latest example is the decision by the Wegmans supermarket chain to discontinue the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products as of next month. The firm, on its own with no prompting from the heavy hand of the government, decided to stop selling the legal substance that many medical studies say contributes to cancer, heart disease and other ailments.

In this space a week ago, we praised Wegmans, not necessarily for its decision but for the fact that it was done in the private sector. Other retailers are making a different decision. That’s their right as well, just as it’s our right to smoke or not to smoke. It’s called the marketplace and, in a larger sense, it’s called freedom.

But now, that vulture we spoke of earlier. This time it comes in the form of state Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, D-Buffalo, who represents parts of Buffalo and all of Grand Island.

Hoyt has introduced a bill that would ban the sale of tobacco from pharmacies. "In light of the overwhelming evidence of the harmful nature of cigarette smoking on one’s health and the astronomical public health cost posed by tobacco products it is contradictory and counter-intuitive to sell such products in any establishment whose purpose is to provide remedies to health problems," he said in a statement.

Because stores such as Tops and Wal-Mart operate pharmacies on their premises, they would be covered under the law. The theory is that if cigarettes are taken out of enough stores if will “de-normalize” the product, as it was put by Jim Ver Steeg of the American Heart Association. And by doing that, the logic goes, it would reduce the sale of tobacco, fewer of us would use it and we would all be happier and healthier.

What nerve. Because Commissar Hoyt doesn’t feel that a drug store is an appropriate venue to sell tobacco, we should all bend to his whim and opinion and endorse the heavy hand of Albany to make it so. How about candy? All that sugar and all those calories. I mean, my goodness, the pharmacy at the back of the store sells insulin for diabetics and diet products to promote weight loss and at the front of the store is the candy counter. Blasphemy.

The anti-smoking zealots love this kind of stuff. The Roswell Park Cancer crowd and the lung and heart associations figure it’s a lot easier to have the jackboot of government edict do their work for them than to do the heavy lifting of convincing the population that smoking is indeed bad for them and that they should quit.

Sure, they’ll say: Just wait until someone you love is made seriously ill or dies from the effects of smoking cigarettes. OK, folks. It’s time for full disclosure.

My grandfather, who ran taverns on 24th Street in the 1950s and in Ransomville in the ’60s, died of lung cancer at age 66. The probable cause of that cancer? His own cigarette habit and breathing the smoke of others every night and day in those taverns.

My father suffered a massive heart attack at age 41 and died from its effects and other ailments 12 years later. His physician told him that his two-and-a-half-pack a day cigarette habit was probably 90 percent of the reason for his physical problems.

Me? I don’t smoke, never have. It’s a vile, filthy, disgusting habit. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to enjoy it.

I loved my father and my grandfather. I love the fact that I don’t smell of cigarettes and my health situation is not being made worse by smoking. But you know what I love most of all? It’s the freedom we all enjoy to make those decisions on our own.

What we should all loathe is the propensity of the Sam Hoyts of the world to try to mold us into their own image of what our society should look like and how we should act in that society. The creeping nannyism of New York state just might be the worst disease of them all.

Dick Lucinski is the managing editor of the Niagara Gazette.

        

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