Tom Keane

The second-hand truce

Since e-cigarettes aren’t a threat to non-smokers, let people puff away

I’M SITTING at a bar and the guy next to me pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking. I’m inwardly seething, wondering what to do. Ignore it? Complain to the bartender and let him do the dirty work? Or confront the smoker myself? And if I do, then what - words exchanged, perhaps a fight?

And then I realize the smoke isn’t bothering me at all. Indeed, I can’t even smell it.

I lean over.

“What is that you’re smoking?’’

“That,’’ it turns out, is an electronic cigarette. The smoke I was looking at was water vapor - steam - and nothing else. The device itself is a small marvel, containing flavored liquid and some nicotine, and it delivers the taste of a cigarette - and the drug - as the user inhales. To complete the effect, the tip even glows. It is, it occurs to me, an excellent way to bring about a truce between those who smoke and those who don’t - a way for us, once again, to occupy the same places in bars, restaurants, and ball fields.

So why won’t Boston let that happen?

Smoking bans are a relatively recent phenomenon. Boston was one of the early adopters, putting in a full-scale ban - covering almost all workplaces, including restaurants and bars - in 1998. Today, 26 states have bans and the US Centers for Disease Control expects that by 2020 all states will have put one in place. And for good reason: one’s right to smoke stops when it hits someone else’s lungs.

Sometimes the bans have been framed as a workers’ rights matter - tobacco fumes in effect create a hazardous work environment. No one, the argument runs, should have to risk their health merely to wait tables. Other times the bans are a weighing of rights. Some patrons smoke, some don’t, and as the number of nonsmokers has grown it’s easier to make those who do give way to those who don’t (usually by just letting them sneak outside for a moment to get a fix). Either way, the bans are deservedly popular. Even some smokers like them; they may not mind inhaling their own smoke, but don’t want to breath someone else’s.

This has all come at a cost to smokers, however, who find themselves increasingly pushed aside and isolated. One doesn’t have to be an enthusiast of smoking to recognize there is some legitimacy in smokers’ complaints that these various bans are in some ways an infringement of their rights.

But the logic for all of those bans plainly disappears if the smoker poses no harm to the non-smoker. That is what makes a recent proposal by Boston’s Public Health Commission so puzzling. Electronic cigarettes are so new that they are largely unregulated and the Commission is now leaping into the gap. (Nothing, one suspects, so quickens the pulse of a regulator as the prospect of new terrain.) One proposal - to limit sales to adults - makes sense; nicotine is a drug after all. But another proposal - to treat electronic cigarettes the same as the tobacco-stuffed kind - is nonsense. By their very nature, electronic cigarettes pose no hazard to anyone except, of course, the person choosing to use them (and, since electronic cigarettes have none of the cancer-causing tars and other byproducts of tobacco, that hazard is far less). So what is the commission’s rationale?

I suspect it’s just a back-door effort to ban adults from smoking. An outright prohibition would still generate much resistance (and, as we have learned from Prohibition and the war on drugs, would ultimately carry negative consequences far greater than the benefits of any ban). But by sharply limiting where adults can use electronic cigarettes, it is in effect trying to accomplish the same thing.

Granted, we all wish people would live their lives as we wished. Personally, I’d ban motorcycles, skydiving, and mountain climbing - dangerous and worthless pursuits all. But the hallmark of a genuinely free society is that we permit people to engage in those and other risky activities as long as they don’t impinge on others’ freedoms. If electronic cigarettes pose no threat to me - and apparently they don’t - then you should be allowed to sit beside me and puff away.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.

Economic sunshine in the Bay State

THERE SEEMS to be a disconnect between what our eyes tell us and the drumbeat of economic misery we hear every day.

Three years ago, Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street was dotted with boarded-up storefronts while shoppers were sparse. Now the place is bustling. The same is true of the city’s other commercial hotspots, such as the waterfront, the North End, and the South End. Restaurants and stores are packed on weekends, to be sure, but increasingly during the week as well. New areas, such as the South Boston Waterfront, now draw crowds and developers. Granted, Downtown Crossing is still a disaster, but its problems are less a function of today’s economy than they are hangovers of the 2008 crash that left us the big empty hole that was once Filene’s.

It isn’t only the city that seems alive. Local shopping malls are packed with cars. The major routes to vacation spots on the Cape and in New Hampshire, Maine, and the Berkshires have been packed this summer as well. Traffic jams have returned, an aggravation that is also an indicator that people are back on the roads, commuting to jobs.

Anecdotes can be misleading, but data back them up. Massachusetts’ unemployment rate in July was 7.6 percent, well below the national average of 9.1 percent. Granted, it’s still too high, and hidden in those numbers are those who have simply given up looking for work and others who have taken jobs paying below what they once made.

Still, it’s better here than elsewhere. For what the national averages themselves hide are the states that are truly economic disasters. Michigan, for instance, has 10.9 percent unemployed - and the number is rising. Nevada is at 12.9 percent (a fact casino opponents might well emphasize). So is California - the Golden State we all once envied.

How did we get it so good? At its core, we have the kind of new-era economy that everyone else says they want, one based on invention and creativity. Financial services, technology, and health care all thrive in Massachusetts. But why are we the way we are? In a state that still mocks itself as “Taxachusetts’’ and (often-deservedly) suffers a reputation as being anti-business, how are we managing to succeed?

Consider three factors. First, we are a tolerant state, accepting of alternative lifestyles, of gays and lesbians, and of immigrants. That may offend some, but it is hugely attractive to others, especially those that urban theorist Richard Florida calls the “creative classes.’’ It’s that group that Florida and many others argue drives cutting-edge economic development.

Second, we are actually making our schools better. Back in 1993, the state legislature pushed through education reform, a series of measures that gave us everything from charter schools to MCAS. Despite resistance through the years, we have stuck with those reforms, and we have reaped the benefits. Our kids now consistently rank better than those from other states; an analysis this year from the American Institute of Physics, for instance, rated Massachusetts first by a large margin in preparing children for careers in science and engineering. Smart workers make for strong economies.

Third, we have a remarkably cohesive political culture. It is striking to see the vicious politics of other states and Washington, D.C., and compare them to the almost genteel way we here in Massachusetts air our disagreements. One can see that in the reaction to US Senator Scott Brown. Yes, of course Democrats want to defeat him next time around. But meanwhile we see Boston’s strongly Democratic mayor last week praising Brown for his work ethic and focus on constituents. It’s hard to imagine that kind of acknowledgement in the poisonous politics of other states, and it speaks well to how the Bay State uses politics as a way to solve problems rather than just to slay the foe.

All this is to our good. Still, Massachusetts is not an island. If a sick economy is like a disease, it may be that we have just resisted longer than others and will eventually succumb to the nation’s maladies. The alternative is unlikely, but still worth considering - that the things Massachusetts does right could spread elsewhere, a kind of positive contagion that could help bring about a cure.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.