Smoking used to be cool. In old movies, everyone smoked, and the big actors incorporated it into their personal images. Teenagers started smoking in high school so they could be popular like all the other cool kids. And in daily life, smoking was just accepted – people even smoked inside.

Then we found out smoking was bad for us. So, smoking was banned in public buildings, forcing smokers outside for their fix. In popular culture, only tough guys and villains smoked. Smoking began to be seen as an addiction inflicted on someone, a problem that needed to be dealt with.

Then we found out smoking was bad for everyone else, too. Secondhand smoke became the new villain. In a reversal of the original trend, peer pressure began forcing people to quit smoking. New taxes started to make it less affordable for smokers to maintain their habit. New laws moved smokers further away from buildings and kept them out of restaurants during mealtimes.

Smoking isn’t just unpopular now; it’s reviled. One person, smoking a cigarette in the designated smoking ghetto and politely minding his or her own business, can attract dirty looks and snide remarks.

Take a quick jaunt through the Campustown bars. There’s not much smoking going on there either, with the exception of Welch Ave Station, owing to its blue-collar atmosphere. Smokers are a minority, and they’re certainly not going out of their way to bother others. The stigma has left smoking only to those who are hopelessly addicted and those who enjoy it for its own sake.

So it seems almost unnecessary for people to keep trying to get the bars to ban smoking. Last fall, Students for Smoke-Free Bars, a student organization, tried to convince the Campustown bars to go smoke-free one night a week. More recently, a survey by the Story County Tobacco Task Force found more than two-thirds of those polled would visit their favored bars more often if they were smoke-free. This really shouldn’t be surprising, considering more than two-thirds of students are nonsmokers.

As Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, once said, “No drinking in bars now [in California] – and soon, no drinking and no talking.” Social smoking is an important part of the bar atmosphere, at least for those who do choose to smoke. And bars are usually the only public places where smoking is allowed. In cities such as Minneapolis, where smoking in bars is illegal, one can see the silliness of the smoke-free bar. What results is not a bunch of happy, healthy people, but a frenzy of frustrated smokers forced to dash outside, away from their friends, every time they want a cigarette. The same scenario here would only serve to infuriate people on the sidewalks.

The issue of secondhand smoke is a legitimate one. Nonsmokers, by and large, do not appreciate nearby smokers – the smoke is irritating and unhealthy. Pushing for a total ban on smoking in bars is simply inflicting a tyranny by majority. If there’s really such a majority in favor of smoke-free bars, a few of them should try it – they’d make a killing.

If we’re going to make smoking in bars a public health concern, shouldn’t we also take Izzard’s remark to its logical extreme and look at alcohol, too? Alcohol is just as widely acknowledged as unhealthy as tobacco. The chief differences are that alcohol is much more intoxicating and, therefore, potentially dangerous, and that its effects on one’s life are much more immediate.

Drunkenness, alcohol addiction and the physical symptoms of alcoholism will wreck your life sooner than lung cancer will. Alcohol’s hold is much stronger and more insidious than tobacco’s. If the matter were really one of overall public health, there’d be laws against drinking. Smoking is targeted because it’s not polite.

Smokers aren’t sadistic barbarians trying to destroy your lungs, nor can they change the simple fact that smoke travels. This is precisely why we should have some – perhaps even most – bars go smoke-free. But making all bars smoke-free is inappropriate – smokers deserve to enjoy their cigarettes socially. Smokers have already been chased to designated zones outside – let them keep a few inside, too.

Bill Cleary is a junior in pre-journalism and mass communication from Ames.