The anti-anti-smoking brigade.

BILL BUCYLEY thinks drugs should be decriminalized. He thinks the resources expended on law enforcement could better be applied to education or moral suasion. While I disagree with him on decriminalization, as does Ernest van den Haag, I agree that persuasion should be our goal. So why heap sarcasm on those who would persuade, whether against smoking or drugs or alcohol?

The cover article by Florence King that appeared in NR's July 9 issue was so extreme in this regard as to make me wonder whether anti-antismoking is to replace anti-Communism as NR's cause-of-choice of the Nineties. I'd Rather Smoke than Kiss" is extremely witty, although the title is misleading, since it implies that sex and smoking are alternatives. The high point of the article, however, is the author's account of her discovery, with "a lover who smoked ... of a uniquely pleasurable footnote to sex: the post-coital cigarette." Taking off on the oldest theme in advertising, she tells us, in effect, to "double your climax, double your fun."

All this would be very amusing, until we realize that it is gallows humor. (The reality is: Those who smoke together croak together.") Smoking kills over three hundred thousand Americans each year, more than lost their lives in the four years of World War II. Contrary to Miss King, these numbers are not an ideological invention. As a public-health question, smoking dwarfs drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS, suicides, and highway fatalities combined.

Confronting the question of suasion against the use of dangerous substances, Abraham Lincoln in 1842 delivered a temperance address in Springfield, Illinois, on Washington's Birthday, to the Washington Temperance Society. He endorsed the "Society's goal of having everyone sign the pledge-whether they were drinkers or (like himself) teetotalers. His aim, he said, was to bring the full weight of society's moral influence to bear upon the problem. To those who would discount this approach, he spoke as follows: "Let me ask the man who would maintain this position most stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head? Not a trifle, I'll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious in it: nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable ... Let us make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnet to church, and instances will be just as rare in the one case as the other."

Does NR think that our commitment to freedom requires us to ridicule virtue and celebrate vice?