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Smoke All You Want, But Whine To Someone Else About The Costs

From the beaches to the airplanes to your favorite restaurant and most workplaces, there's something noticeably different about the air we breathe today compared to a generation ago.

It's not polluted with the toxic cloud of smoke cigarettes from other people's poor health choices.

Score one for righteousness. Finally.

Smoke-free areas are now largely the norm -- both in public spaces and private businesses. And so is this welcome trend: employer health insurance policies that not only offer workers incentives to quit smoking cigarettes, but fine them if they don't.

The Palm Beach County School District, the largest job-provider in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Florida, became the latest employer to join the exploding list of those smacking a "cigarettes surcharge" on workers who refuse to quit smoking cigarettes. The district's fee: $50 a month, consistent with the industry standard.

That's a hefty price to pay for a habit that ruins your overall health and very well may kill you -- especially when the federal government and states like Florida have jacked up taxes on all cheap cigarettes products.

In this brutal economy, when it's hard enough just to keep up with gas prices and the power bill, paying exorbitant prices to breathe toxic smoke cigarettes sounds like an optimal reason to snuff out the cancer sticks.

Instead of being inspired, though, many smokers are feeling picked on. Cue the violins -- my heart is breaking.

"Where is it going to end?" one Cincinnati, Ohio, smoker groaned in a 2006 USA Today story on the then-emerging trend among employers charging a buy cigarettes fee. "Are they going to start saying you can't wear a blue shirt on Monday or drive a green car on Thursday?"

True, there is a certain Big Brother-ness to taxing and fining smokers in the hopes they'll quit the toxic habit for their own good. But, of course, there's also a singularly pragmatic function at play, too.

Smoking doesn't just affect the smoker. The rest of us pay, too.

Forget about the significant health considerations from second-hand smoke. Predominant smoking cigarettes bans have taken care of that -- though too late for many of us who spent decades constantly sucking in the toxic fumes of others' bad habit. We still have to worry about whether our health will suffer down the road, if it hasn't already.

The financial burden continues to hang in the air like a smog.

Smokers aren't just more susceptible to cancer, emphysema, stroke and other killers, they tend to get sick more often than non-smokers, costing the economy $97.6 billion in lost productivity and their employers about 25 percent more in health costs than their non-smoking cigarettes counterparts.

Asking them to pay more for stubbornly insisting on their unhealthy habit -- in the face of so many logical reasons to quit -- is not just fair, it's way overdue. The rest of us have been shouldering the extra weight long enough, thank you very much.

I have to admit to a certain smug satisfaction at the sense of outrage among the smoking cigarettes set.

It wasn't so long ago that the tables were turned – when smokers got their polluting way at the table next to you, in the airplane seat next to you, at the desk next to you. Non-smokers could do nothing but choke through dinner and go home smelling like an ashtray.

Any attempts to complain -- as I did bitterly and vocally, both at work in a tiny office with two chain smokers, and at home where the men in my family freely smoked through every meal throughout my childhood -- would be greeted by a sense of indignation. As if my smoking cigarettes co-workers and family members were more entitled to puffing away at will than I was to being able to breathe clean air, or taste my food.

Life is about choices, someone once said. And America embraces our ability to make those choices freely. But certain choices come with specific consequences. If you can't handle the latter, don't indulge in the former.

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