If your smoke has the potential to harm me just by inhalation it's unconstitutional. At least in public places. But banning smoking in public places isn't unconstitutional.
I voted that they are constitutional because as yet they haven't been found not to be when challenged in courts. Please read.. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...zPW2DA&usg=AFQjCNGIoLES7nAWUXqaVTv00YYf4X52zg
Under what theory are they unconstitutional? The state can already tell you that you are not allowed to make changes to your property (inside or outside)--usually a power they invoke when they find your property to be "historic" or a "landmark" in some way. So it's not that they cannot interfere with your right to do what you want with your property. Not every law that abridges liberty, and not every law that is dumb, is unconstitutional. Some laws are perfectly constitutional, but yet still a bad idea.
since the constitution was written on hemp paper, and almost every man who signed it admitted using pot, id say so.
If seatbelt laws and laws against Marijuana and laws against job discrimination are constitutional then I guess smoking bans are also constitutional.
Ban smoking where? I don't want to breath smoke. I don't mind if someone smokes, but I don't want to breath it. Smoking on a bus, plane, train, restaurant, hospital, these places need to ban it because it greatly effects the health of people who have to work in or use these facilities.
Unconstitutional how? I'm not sure how one might establish the unconstitutionality of smoking bans as a general concept. I'm quite certain that it is possible to write one so poorly as to be unconstitutional, but I'm an American, and the one argument that doesn't work for other drugs is that banning them outright is unconstitutional. Marijuana, for instance, is a Schedule I controlled substance. If it came down to outright prohibition of tobacco, cigarettes would definitely qualify, as the Schedule criteria are addictive potential and harm to user.
I'm not sure that smoking bans on private property are "Unconstitutional", since at this point the Constitution means nothing but what some judge wants it to mean. But I will say that they are an obvious violation of a property owner's rights.
It's a bit more complicated than that I'm not certain such questions actually do any good. We hear this sort of thing all the time: there is no specifically enumerated constitutional right to an abortion, or to be gay, or to smoke pot, or even be married. What the United States Constitution does, primarily, is outline the government. It specifically empowers the government on some counts, and proscribes it on others. The Bill of Rights and several subsequent amendments attend to the people. And that's where things become more complex than the question suggests. Often we hear people complain about judicial activism. Listen to abortion foes denounce Roe v. Wade. No enumerated right to abortion; no enumerated right to privacy. Yet the decision resulted from consideration of various constitutional provisions and the relationships between them. That is: If constitutional provisions (A), (B), and (C), then constitutional outcome (D). In the case of smoking tobacco, I've yet to hear the argument that guarantees the right. If marijuana is Schedule 1 for its addictive potential and harm to the user, then cigarettes definitely qualify. And no constitutional construction yet has overturned marijuana prohibition. Smokers should thank (or damn) the tobacco lobby that cigarettes are legal at all. ____________________ Notes: Supreme Court of the United States. Roe v. Wade. January 22, 1973. Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. December 2, 2010. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZS.html
No, my question strike at the heart of the matter: being allowed to or not allowed to smoke is not contained in the constitution, its is a matter of law and rights surely, but to start decrying that is constitutional or unconstitutional is histrionic and absurd. Smoking is just one of many permutations on question on constitutionality that should not logically be asked, here are some more examples: Is a ban on pigeon hunting unconstitutional? Is a ban on loitering unconstitutional? Is sex with monkeys unconstitutional? Get the picture, its absurd for the OP to even ask the question, the constitution does not even cover such a subject nor should it, now if the OP asked if smoking bans are oppressive, violate civil rights, etc, that would be a more worthy question.
This and That The problem I have with the question, "Where does the Constitution say you have the right to ______?" is that it presumes a certain outlook on constitutionality. We have many rights that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Those rights are what I refer to as constitutional outcomes. As I suggested, they are implied and established through consideration of various constitutional provisions and the relationships between them. I think it would be less problematic for our topic poster to ask the question if he provided some rationale for how the constitutional right exists. • • • Up here in the Seattle area we have a periodic argument about HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes—e.g., "carpool lanes". There are interests that would like nothing more than to see these freeway lanes disappear. I mention this because my eight year-old daughter has recently taken up the futile habit of covering her face with her hands when she walks through a parking lot or anywhere else she might breathe foul-smelling exhaust fumes. And because I have long wondered why people need to pour so much exhaust into the atmosphere. To wit, when I lived in Seattle proper, I took the bus to work. Presently, I live in an area that, inasmuch as it has been developed at all, seems planned in such a manner as to require people to drive cars in order to get around. Additionally, my brother recalls that, when he lived in California, many people had a habit of driving to a friend's place when it was less than two blocks down the street. I've heard Los Angelenos defend this practice because of the weather, the air pollution (?!), &c. But this was farther north, in Palo Alto. Even when I worked in Seattle, I had a friend that would drive to lunch even if she was going only three blocks. I always found this strange, since she though walking was too slow compared to the time we were allotted. Yet I know demonstratively that the time it took to walk to the garage, retrieve the car, drive the three blocks, and then find a parking space was greater than it took to walk from work to the restaurant. Thus, how should we regard driving cars? That is, why should I have to breathe the exhaust of someone who is too lazy to walk three blocks on a beautiful day in June? Why should I have to breathe the exhaust of someone who wants to live forty miles away from their work and drives a gas-guzzling, air-polluting, single-occupancy SUV the whole way? I get the whole thing about second-hand smoke, and I don't object. But, still, I do wonder about other harmful things people do to each other for extraneous reasons. Does the logic—"If you don't blow it in my face ...."—apply to other forms of extraneous carcinogenic air pollution? Seattle is still fighting over light rail and monorail. The monorail argument has been going on for nearly fifty years. In all that time, we could have built up a system instead of developing our communities and local economies in such a manner as to demand all this extraneous driving. So it's not as if we're just discovering a problem and saying, "We didn't know before now!" One of my friends, who was raised in southern California, once chuckled at a Seattle discussion of air pollution and smog. "What smog?" he asked. So I pointed west and said, "Dude, you see that island out there?" "What island?" he asked. I nodded and replied, "Exactly." Twenty-five years ago, you could see Blake Island from certain places in Seattle. That's not always true today.
This is interesting, actually. Are "addictive" and "harm" objectively defined? Because one might make a case that, say, the internet could be both addictive and harmful.
No good answer for that excellent question An excellent question, especially as at least until 1999/2000 (Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act), methamphetamine was listed as Schedule 2, meaning the government considered it less addictive and less harmful to the user than marijuana. No, I don't have a good answer for how they assess harm and addiction.
Slight difference is that one activity hurts others' health, not their morals/prudeness... Nobody has the constitutional right to hurt someone else's health. End of story....
