Karina Gonzalez
I am a dirty filthy smoker.†
† I smoke a pack a day and by all indications from those that I come into contact with, I am going to soon be infected with terrible diseases and probably die early.†
† As if that weren’t punishment enough for my choice, now, because of my habit, I am potentially a criminal in my own town.
† The City of Calabasas decided on Feb. 15 that second hand smoke is so detrimental to the public health that it criminalized smoking in all public places of the city.
† No longer can I sit on the patio at Starbucks and study, smoking an occasional cigarette.† That might lead to a warning or even a fine for polluting the lungs of my fellow citizens.
† First, I must tell you that I really enjoy my smoking.† I love my cigarettes, enjoy indulging in the occasional cigar, and have even dabbled in smoking hookah.
† There is no denying that I am addicted, but I have quit before and decided that the life of a non-smoker just wasn’t for me.†
† So, I choose to keep my pack close, lighter ever at the ready, and breathe in each drag as if it were the best thing to ever enter my body.†
I understand the health risks, and I choose to smoke anyway.
†For making this informed decision, I have been forced to endure the constant torment of the vehement non-smoking segment of society.†
†There was the day when I sat at a coffee shop in the Commons working on homework and people-watching.†
A woman walking by with her two children saw me exhale and quickly snatched up her daughter into her arms, glared at me, covered both of the kids faces and said, “Walk quickly.† The bad lady’s smoking is bad for you.”†
†That was before the City Council decided to pass the Comprehensive Second-Hand Smoke Control Ordinance.†
Now I am just an outlaw that practices a sort of secrecy akin to bootlegging.
†I can smoke on my patio at home because it doesn’t adjoin to a common area of the apartment complex, as the ordinance stipulates.†
Yet every time that I do, some other tenant walking by will look up at me, mutter something obscene about my dying young or that I should quit, so I now sit on the ground of the patio so that they can’t see me.† I’m sure they still mutter at the billowing clouds of smoke, but at least they can’t look at me.
†When I walked into the management office of my complex after smoking, I was sniffed and told “Don’t you know that this is a non-smoking town?” with a sly smile.
†Last week, a group of friends and I went to dinner at a small sushi restaurant in town.† Anyone that has ever been a smoker knows that the “after-eating” cigarette is one of the most delicious that you will have all day.†
†We all stepped outside, and while we waited for valet, lit up.† Then I remembered.† I am in Calabasas!
NO SMOKING!†
We all dodged around behind a car and ducked down low, hoping that the other patrons wouldn’t report us.
†As we sat there on the ground, I thought of the pot-smokers in high school, who hid behind the cars in the back of the parking lot so that the bicycle-riding security guards wouldn’t find them.†
†The town ordinance has made me, a 25-year-old woman with a full time job and a Dean’s List school record, into one of them.† I am hiding a secret in my own hometown.† I am a bad lady.
†Still, I have to say, it doesn’t make me want to quit.† I merely makes me indignant.
If I can choose not to smoke around large groups of people, then others can choose to walk away when I do decide to light up.
†One of my instructors recently said we have reached a point in legal regula tion where the state can no longer protect one person’s rights without infringing upon someone else’s.† It seems that the City of Calabasas has decided on that.